Fricke's Picks: Spanish Electricity at SXSW

It was only 9 p.m. on opening night when I hit my first pay dirt of this year's SXSW in Austin: Capsula a kinetic trio from Bilbao, Spain — singer-guitarist Martin Guevara and bassist Coni Duchess, the band's founding couple, are originally from Argentina — who were supposed to be obsessed with the Velvet Underground (according to a newspaper preview) but were actually a high-velocity union of the Cramps and the Who, coated in corroded glam. Guevara attacked his guitar with a serious case of Pete Townshend, and drummer Alberto Diez was an improbable mix of Keith Moon and the Velvets' Maureen Tucker: flash with heartbeat. In the last song of the set, a furious space-out that sounded like the Who doing Pink Floyd's "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun," Guevara swallowed his mike Lux Interior-style and scraped his guitar strings along the edge of the stage. You don't get those visuals with Capsula's new album, Rising Mountains (BCore), but you get the idea — and everything I heard.