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Youth Lagoon, Live In Concert: SXSW 2013

NPR

By Stephen Thompson

Published March 14, 2013 at 5:21 AM EDT

A studio wizard still in his early 20s, Youth Lagoon's Trevor Powers makes music that documents the spiraling uncertainty of a worried mind. It must have been tough to translate to the live stage, where the comfort and cover of the studio are stripped away and every fussy swirl has to be thoughtfully re-created or excised entirely.

Performing between Café Tacvba and Yeah Yeah Yeahs — tucked into a back room at Stubb's in Austin for SXSW — Powers showed that he's got it figured out, thanks in part to a crack backing band. Manning a keyboard with an array of effects, not to mention rocking a formidably frizzy mop of hair, Powers presided over a fleshed-out sound that stretched his flourishes over a sturdy skeleton. It's still music that faces inward, but it never collapses under the energy needed to thrive on stage.

Credits

Producers: Mito Habe-Evans, Robin Hilton, Amy Schriefer; Technical Director: Kevin Wait; Event Coordinator: Saidah Blount; Assistant Producer: Denise DeBelius; Videographers: Christopher Farber, Katie Hayes Luke, A.J. Wilhelm; Audio Engineering by Metro Mobile; Production Assistants: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo, Ryan Smith; Special Thanks to: Stubb's and South By Southwest; Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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