Camaraderie, Collaboration, and Sonic Time Travel Stuffed the 2024-2025 Austin Music Awards
Stacked Antone’s jam piled on the sounds of the city
Reviewed by Raoul Hernandez, Fri., March 7, 2025
In an age when the history of music streams for pennies and its soundtrack now filters through any willing artist, the 43rd annual Austin Music Awards represented its scene through all times Sunday night at Antone’s after reinventing itself completely and contemporarily starting in 2020.
Matching the Academy Awards that night and the Grammys a week earlier with a runtime of 3.5 hours, the local music equivalent took the latter’s cue: less awards-giving in favor of wall-to-wall performances. Not that fewer honors got voted on otherwise. This year’s Austin Music Poll once again proves the Live Music Capital knows exactly the time on its atomic clock.
Alt hit factory Being Dead took Band of the Year but now loses Cody Dosier’s beard, which he swore to shave once the trio finally yanked down this specific brass ring. Gary Clark Jr. walked off with Musician, Album, and Song of the Year, plus Best Blues and Guitarist, though technically Gary Clark Sr. did in accepting his son’s plaques. And a valiant AMAs crew, a marvel of efficiency and camaraderie, heroically wrestled mobility-impaired Earl Poole Ball onstage for induction into the show’s musician Hall of Fame and a mini set straight out of 1967.
That wouldn’t be the only time leap in either direction in an overstuffed stacking of ATX soundscaping, shredding, and sheer ecosystem transcendence.
Steel guitar whisperer Sweet Gary Newcomb spun an instant and immersive cocoon of sound for Soupy Sales, or rather MC Kevin “Austin Chronic” Curtin, to emerge from in his white leisure jeans. Soon enough, the first of five quick-turn sets literally lit up the comfy, intimate Home of the Blues, still just blocks from its 1975 debut on Sixth Street. In a perfect segue, Font followed with meditative surround sounds, a post-progressive weave of instrumentalism – jazz done prog or post-punk gone free.
Touch Girl Apple Blossom set the backstage abuzz.
“New Sincerity,” quipped one scene vet.
“Sounds like Austin 1989,” observed another separately, both referencing the same trend.
Zeitgeist, a legendary Velvet Underground of sorts at the center of said scene, got mentioned too as TGAB worked through an indeed sincere reading of classic college rock. Follow-up Good Looks synced with the curation, looking like Bachman-Turner Overdrive but sounding like Twin/Tone, an inebriating brew of rootsy pop housed inside a bar rock guitar paradigm that flared up like Crazy Horse. The AMAs’ innate ability to index brewing, breaking, and establishing acts all in one, decade after decade, continues to illustrate Austin’s musical map of the world.
Two collaborative set-pieces dominated the evening. Sandwiching a penultimate feature by Geto Gala, rap duo Jake Lloyd and Deezie Brown, the blues before by the Antone’s House Rockers and a global fusion from the Point and Friends afterward ultimately connected every guest spot via a roots through line. The revolving door of one-off coactivations dizzied.
Oak-tall and tawny, drummer Jay Moeller led a house conglomeration of greatness in tributing posthumous Hall of Fame guitarist Bill Campbell. Six-string all-stars Sue Foley and Derek O’Brien drove the train like Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, while piano king and queen Earl Poole Ball and Marcia Ball truly tickled and goosed the keys. Gram Parsons, Freddie King, and Gatemouth Brown all made appearances in a spirit that filled the Fifth Street shrine.
Guitar hero Jack Montesinos, ATX music scion/keyboardist Joe Roddy, and drum piston Nico Leophonte, now making the Point, hosted eight – count ’em, eight! – sound criers straight out of the Monterey Pop Festival: opening peace and love incantation leader Mohammad Firoozi, second-line quartet Big Wy’s Brass Band, hypnotic Latin charmers lluvii, blues antenna Eve Monsees, sitar master Indrajit Banerjee, monster guitarist (and Point producer/booster) Beto Martinez, country beguiler Camille Lewis, and closing pachanga Superfónicos.
From the Lone Star seat to Mali, they and the AMAs represented our town for all time.
The 2024-2025 Austin Music Awards
Antone’s Nightclub
March 2
