Our Saturday recap is up and bursting with raves about Jim James, Robyn and Kate Nash, but you can also check out more detailed accounts at the You R Here blog. What happened yesterday? Well…

· Comeback-making pop singer
Robyn wowed Perez Hilton’s party with glitchy electro-beats and profane lyrics

· Young British songstress Kate Nash overcame marble floors and obnoxious concertgoers

· Jim James and M. Ward got reverent at an intimate concert held in a church

· The Night Marchers rocked in the daylight at Waterloo Park

· Grand Ole Party drummed up some new fans at the Mess With Texas fest

· Black Tide rolled into Red Seven with waves of hair and metal riffs

· Foxy Shazam bled onstage at Emo’s and delivered a fabulously unsexy pole dance

We’ve been subjecting a variety of artists to our 5X5 @ SWSX interrogation down here in Austin this week, and one of the most interesting answers so far comes from Pharrell Williams. Not only did he say he thought he heard some accordion in Vampire Weekend’s music, but he came up with his own label for the style that the band itself calls “Upper West Side Soweto.” Take a look:

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

Gil Kaufman reports:

Every year South by Southwest is like a big Lone Star and pulled-pork trough filled with bands to discover and write about. But it’s also the place where those of us who don’t live on a coast can go to find out what the hipsters are wearing and what we should start looking for at our local Salvation Army. Last year it was the throwback moon boot. The year before brought the onslaught of the painted-on boy jeans.

This year’s must-have accessory, for boys and girls? The headband. Whether it’s bejeweled, a bright orange, gold braid or just plain old sweat, the headband is what all the cool kids are rocking this year.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

Gil Kaufman reports:

We’ve said it before, people, but it bears repeating. Along with your sound, the second most important thing any band has to do, maybe even more important than your sound in the beginning, is choose a name that’s either: a) instantly cool and/or intriguing (Nirvana, Radiohead) or so lame it’s back to being great again (Weezer, Panic at the Disco).

Clearly, many of the bands who played showcases Friday night at South by Southwest didn’t get this memo. Among them: Vancougar, Coconut Coolouts, the Show Is a Rainbow, Mittens on Strings, We Versus the Shark, Everlovely Lightningheart, Psychedelic Horses—, the Homosexuals, the Crash That Took Me, and Goat the Head.

Honorary mentions go to other bands playing the festival, including What Laura Says, Thinks and Feels, 43 Songs about 43 Presidencies, Songs for Moms, Til We’re Blue or Destroy, Ringo Deathstarr, Gorch Fock, Woodpigeon, Uh Huh Her, Death Sentence: Panda!, Collections of Colonies of Bees, I Was a Cub Scout, Does It Offend You, Yeah? and one of my favorites, DJ Pube$.

Then, there’s the names that guarantee that the band will probably never make it beyond SXSW, but we appreciate their creativity and we applaud their awesome, if scary, imaginations: A Thousand Knives of Fire, Dixie Witch, Tennessee Boltsmokers and Bible of the Devil.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

There is a long-running joke in the industry about so-called “hip-hop time,” which basically means that if you have an interview scheduled with a rapper, it will never, ever start on time.

So, not surprisingly, when MTV super-producer Andrew Millard and I arrived at the Austin Convention Center for our 12:45 chat with the legendary Ice Cube, who’s headlining a showcase tonight, we knew we’d have some time to kill. After all, Cube is one of the guys who practically invented “hip-hop time” (and gangsta rap too). But little did we know that we’d be killing that time in a sparse “dressing room,” which was little more than a giant bathroom with some potted plants thrown in for good measure.

So we waited. We rearranged the potted plants. We adjusted the camera. And then we readjusted it. Finally, at roughly 1:30 p.m., Cube himself strode into the room, laughed at a joke we made about the place looking like a florist’s bathroom, threw on the microphone and got down to business.

We spoke about his politically charged new album, Raw Footage, about George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, and even about his experiences at South by Southwest (he checked out the Clipse and Kid Sister, and marveled “at some band that set up in a parking lot and started playing next to our car”). We also put him through our 5X5 @ SXSW questions:

We only got about 10 minutes before his publicist told us he had to go, but the wait was totally worth it. And as he left the room, he forgot to unhook his mic, and his motion sent the whole thing tumbling to the linoleum floor. Cube stopped, laughed for a second, and exited the room by saying, “Damn, that’s the only mic I ever dropped. ”

We told you the dude was a legend.

Check in with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

So it’s Friday night in Austin, you’re three days into a total indulgence of bands, booze and music. You’ve seen Yeasayer or some other hipster band four times already, you’ve memorized Santogold’s set, you’ve had too much beer at the Blender magazine building, and some weird guy is trying to coax you to his friend’s band’s 2 a.m. performance with free burgers. It’s the end of the night and you’re just looking for something … different.

Well, tonight was different. A free show by two great bands, No Age and F***** Up, on a pedestrian walkway bridge about two miles away from where the rest of SXSW is happening, at 3 a.m. (THREE A. M.!), under the cover of darkness. These are the things that happen when determined hipsters coagulate into a critical mass of creative thinking. Most of the kids made the trek by foot, rather than cab, thugging it out for short-but-sweet sets by the two bands, amongst a cavalcade of dedicated music-lovers not quite ready to call it a night. Sightlines were poor but the music was great. Mostly, we just love that something this … illicit … can still happen at such a major music festival in a big city. Above, a picture of the crowd (um, like we said, the sightlines were POOR).

Gil Kaufman reports:

If you’ve ever read any of my reports from multi-day festivals, such as August’s Lollapalooza, you know I hate hot weather. Like, really, really hate.

Well, luckily for us down here in Austin at South by Southwest, Friday brought record high temperatures in the low to mid-90s to the city and, well, frankly the only smell worse than Sixth Street at midnight halfway through the festival (think stale beer, sweat, a bit of upchuck and unwashed hipsters) is the hellish stench of thousands of dudes in skinny jeans, embroidered thrift store cowboy shirts and matted hair crushed into a venue with no air conditioning at 3 p.m. You’ll want to plead for a slow death, preferably one in which your olfactory senses are somehow disconnected.

So, while trying to walk from one shady sliver to another, I took some photos for an essay I like to call Cool/ Not Cool. I tried to find people who were appropriately dressed for the heat (thanks, Perry Farrell, for setting a good example in your black mesh sleeveless T-shirt; you too, guy in the white pants and panama hat).

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Gil Kaufman reports:

You’ll have to excuse the gentlemen in Seattle’s Fleet Foxes for looking a bit confused when their Friday afternoon set at Emo’s was bum rushed by a pair of dudes from “Human Giant” wielding what looked like homemade T-shirt cannons. When Rob Huebel and Aziz Ansari rushed the stage before the set of pastoral freak folk from the recent Sub Pop signing (debut album due in June), they warned the crowd to watch out.

“We’re the T-shirt squad!” Huebel barked as he loaded his cannon.

“Cover her eyes … don’t sue us!” added Ansari as the members of the Foxes looked on with a mix of bemusement and perplexity.

Check back with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

So after three days of trekking back and forth across Austin, I finally had a blow-out. My prized loafers — a clutch $10 find at a thrift store — decided they’d had too much and, as you can see, the right one has decided to give up the ghost (or, more specifically, the sole).

Concerned, I hobbled over to a boot repair place on Colorado Avenue, where I was told that a blow-out of this proportion would take “four days to fix, (be)’cause they’d have to send it to the shop.” Obviously, I don’t have four days, so until Sunday, my options are a) bite the bullet and pick up a pair of cowboy boots, or b) suck it up and hobble around SXSW with my toes sticking out of my shoes like some sad little hobo. And given my current financial situation, it looks like I’m going with “b,” which means I should get fitted for a little ‘kerchief bundle on the end of a stick.

Check in with the Newsroom blog throughout SXSW for more highlights, and be sure to visit our sister blog You R Here for concert reviews, photos and more.

Hey, folks. Friday at SXSW was the hottest day of ’08 so far in Austin —. 90 degrees easy, sweating cojones, and I’ve got a farmer’s tan. Great.

But on to the good news — I was already a huge fan of No Age’s music — they had made a believer out of me months ago, which is no easy feat for Angelenos since I have an old Woody Allen-like resistance to West Coast phenomena. But seriously, there are few more exciting bands to have made a national splash in the past year, so I am happy to report Dean and Randy are awesome guys through and through.

At least that is my assessment after talking to them for an hour in front of a self-proclaimed “old hippie’s house” in south Austin, adjacent to a performance space/ vintage clothing store called the Opera House — the perfect spot for an afternoon showcase by the Smell, the L.A. club that has become a mecca for DIY-minded musicians and artists and which No Age more than anyone have made an indie household name.

What a difference a year makes for Randy and Dean. At SXSW ’07, they said they were “talking their way” onto the bill at most shows, and in fact got tossed from one Austin club after Randy tried to plant a kiss on an aggressive bouncer who got in his face. This year, they are more than welcome on any lineup. With a flurry of EP releases last spring, a growing summertime buzz, a much read New Yorker piece, the release of their Weirdo Rippers album in the fall, and signing with the indomitable Sub Pop, who will release their album Nouns in May, No Age are the little punk duo that could — and did.

“After the New Yorker article came out,” Dean told me, “I was even getting e-mails from 60-year-old ladies saying, ‘I don’t even really know what punk music is, but I think you guys and what you are doing is great.’ “

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