Communion Music: Celeste, Tamino, and Angie McMahon Take Us to Church | SXSW 2019
Communion Music returned to SXSW for their annual Friday night spot converting Austin’s St David’s Church in to a live music venue. With a solid reputation for showcasing the best upcoming bands, past Communion line ups at SXSW have included an international array of artists from the likes of Maggie Rogers to Rag ‘n’ Bone Man. Here are the top picks from this year’s Communion showcase:
Celeste (UK)
Celeste’s (above) debut EP ‘Lately’ was just released last week, shortly after her performances at SXSW. Tracks from the EP formed a large part of her set list, including crowd favourite ‘Father’s Son,’ which was an emotional moment as the song is dedicated to her late father. In fact, most of Celeste’s songs address rather sad topics, which is where she finds her inspiration to write, but listening to her music is more like finding peace and comfort than triggers. Taking front and centre with a glowing white suit that looked particularly striking upon the church’s altar, the live instruments that accompanied her were far from the usual. Her band included a saxophonist who had a very prominent part in forming her overall sound, providing solos and top line melodies too.
Angie McMahon (Australia)
Angie was the winner of this year’s Grulke Prize for Developing Non-US Act. An accolade held by Jade Bird last year, the Grulke prize is a title given by SXSW to artists they feel are delivering innovative creativity and have long term careers in performance ahead of them. Angie’s music is an interesting combination of ballad-type lyrics and romance, backed up by soaring rock riffs and dynamic instrumentation. Her latest release ‘Pasta’ is an example of her ability to take the everyday mundane yet relatable object and and build a narrative around it, which is quite special. Angie has her first ever London show - an already sold out headline - upcoming on May 28th at The Lexington.
Tamino (Belgium)
Tamino is Belgium artist who delivers mysteriously dark music with an astounding voice. Playing acoustic, it was a special opportunity to see his raw voice with no distractions. Tamino delivered notes across the whole vocal spectrum, where his deep tones were as alluring as his falsettos. His debut album ‘Amir’ (in reference to his full name Tamino-Amir) was released last summer under Communion Music itself. The first track on the album ‘Habibi’ is always the one that takes the crowd by surprise live, and was a definite favourite moment of the set, sending the audience in to a silent trance. In fact, his music is so hypnotising that the audience fell in to silence even during his sound-check! Be sure to catch his first London headline at Earth Hackney on April 23rd.