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Smith Westerns, Live In Concert: SXSW 2011

Smith Westerns' members are no strangers to NPR Music's coverage of the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas: Just last year, they were a bunch of skinny, no-name teenagers winning over the crowd at our annual daytime party. That enjoyable and ingratiating set — all propulsive rock energy, timeless pop hooks and some of the shiniest hair in music — laid the groundwork nicely for last fall's well-received Dye It Blonde, a engaging blast of candy-coated swagger.

Given that only a year has passed since that show, these guys are still jarringly young — and still the owners of shampoo-commercial-quality hair. But newer songs like "Tonight" and "Weekend" feel exceptionally sturdy, built on a foundation that conjures images of both Replacements-style rock and girl-group pop. That mix of brashness and sweetness loses nothing in translation to the live stage.

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

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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.)