Congratulations are in order for a handful of local bands named to the official South by Southwest festival schedule this week! They are:

• Jacob Abello
• The Boom Bang
• Defining Times
• Junebug Spade
• The Non (guitarist Zach Zeller pictured)
• Horse Thief

Looking forward to seeing and hearing you guys represent the north side of the Red River well! Feel free to check out the rest of the bands listed at the SXSW site.

Former OKSee skipper Stephen Carradini and I will in Austin, Texas, next month (next month, you guys!), possibly with regular Gazette contributor Joshua Boydston, whose press credentials we’re waiting to receive. We’ll be crawling all over town to bring you recaps and photos from these and other bands’ sets, so be sure to check back with OKSee and follow us on Twitter, too.

There’s little I can say to add to the conversation about our reigning Best in Rock band (though that’ll change when next week’s <i>Gazette</i> hits the racks), except that the last two years, while being low-key in terms of activity, have definitely preserved their live skill as players. 

The Non are experimental and progressive, sure, but you can count on them being consistent in that progression, wherever and whenever they play. I still have yet to see them play show that’s anything less than thrilling.

But yeah, they did their usual instrumental ping-pong in space thing we all love so much. It was Zach Zeller’s (pictured) second show of the night, and bassist Tom Bishop and guitarist Wil Norton flew in from Norman (Bishop’s a certified pilot) and out in the same night, just to play. Gotta admire that determination.

So Cameron Neal (my latest local-rock man-crush) and his band of teenaged ACM@UCO students (drummer Preston Greer was the only Horse Thief-er whose hands lacked big, smeary X’s inside Friends Bar last night) sounded even larger, more looming and fierce than their Sooner Soundwave show in Norman last weekend, which was my first experience hearing them in person. With all the pressure and anticipation of the festival, I feel like they really raised the bar on local performances at SXSW. 

First off, Mr. Neal has this awesome old man authoritative rock voice that he adopts for narrative purposes on songs like “The Magician.” Most of Horse Thief’s topicality is mystical nonsense wrapped around nuggets of wisdom, so it’s a useful persona, and it gets really entertaining when he starts dumping sweat and shaking it all out in his impressive beard.

But yeah, it was really nice to see — after The Boom Bang’s raucous mess and The Non’s cerebral movements — a throwback-style band that earnestly wants to rock, while also trying to innovate a bit (they’ve got a keyboard that generates an organ sound which distinguishes them from most any other local band I know of). Cody Fowler looks up into the sky when the song calls for his bass notes to wobble all over the place and Greer makes an O-face when he gets to punish the snares. And Danny Rose looks about as happy shredding his guitar apart as Kevin Durant looks when he hits a 24-foot-stepack three.

Also, it should be noted that two members of The Boom Bang got kicked out of Friends for being rowdy at some point during Horse Thief's set which is impressive, because there was only The Non's in between them.

Photo by Doug Schwarz