48 Best Things We Saw at SXSW 2014

Annie Clark lived up to the buzz on her new album — a career high-water mark — when her current tour rolled into Austin for a single show (at the NPR Music showcase) that stunned even devoted fans. Along with the new material was a remarkable new theatricality, no doubt hot-wired in part by her recent collaborations with David Byrne. In a white dress splattered with blood-red appliqués, she climbed atop a stacked platform, collapsed in a heap, writhed on the ground, and moved through a series of kabuki marionette moves punctuated by explosions of abstract guitar shredding. Charming, sexy, and scary, it made every rock & roll hair-toss, pogo and loaf-pinch grimace over the rest of the weekend seem like an archaic language.