Big Troubles- Live- SXSW- Micro-Pixel-Rites BBQ- Austin, TX- March 18, 2010 from Samantha Cornwell on Vimeo.

I have to admit that my favorite way to see Big Troubles is inside a darkly lit interior with the sound turned up just shy of shattering your ear drums. That liminal space between discovering yourself at the foot of a wall of sound the size of Stonehedge (replete with a secondary racket of screaming overtones) and no longer being able to hear anything at all (simply because the whole thing is too damn LOUD) is one the band wears well — especially since they manage to combine this effect with songwriting that that would already be something to write home to mom about, amplified or not. When they performed “Slouch” at the Micro-Pixel-Rites SXSW backyard showcase last week, I managed to find an invisible fault line across the center of the lawn where the sound funneled in a straight shot out of the amplifiers and into my ears. Seeing them for the first time in the light of day definitely spritzed some Sun-In on the whole Big Troubles experience, though I have to say that the Elysian setting somehow made their music even more inexplicably melancholic. Sigh.
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