This is punk rock: Damian Abraham, frontman for Toronto hardcore heavies Fucked Up, launches himself off the stage and onto the floor of Sixth Street club Vice; the crowd instinctually gets the hell out of the way, and forms a circle around him. However, they do so not just to avoid making contact with the burly singer’s wrecking ball of a body — they’re just trying to get the best angle for a cameraphone shot. This is punk rock at South by Southwest (SXSW) — where the compulsion to see as many bands as time and alcohol tolerance will allow is superceded only by the urge to blog about them.

SXSW is commonly referred to “spring break for the music industry,” however, with that industry’s well-documented decline continuing apace, who’s got time for a break? It is perhaps no coincidence that as record sales fall, SXSW just gets bigger and bigger, spawning a competing cottage industry of unofficial daytime parties that allow artists to milk their time in Austin for all its promotional worth. The scenario — with live music blasting through the city streets every day from noon till 2am — presents a candy-store array of musical riches while encouraging a noncommittal mode of consumption, sampling bands’ performances in a manner that’s no more emotionally vested than clicking through their MySpace page.

But after four days of assembly-line spectatorship, certain unifying threads emerge that help one establish some semblance of order amid the chaos. These are our findings:

ANGER IS AN ENERGY DRINK
Judging the state of the industry based on SXSW is about as accurate as reading tea leaves, but it was still remarkable how little the whole thing was affected by declining fortunes brought about by downloading — the day parties boasted no shortage of free drinks, t-shirts or any of the other corporate-sponsored swag. Pop music is still glamorous, and big companies are still interested in being aligned with it (and artists are still uncomfortable with the idea, as Randy Randall from LA noise-pop duo No Age observed at one party, pointedly referring to “our good friends Dell and Stereogum and Paste and Fuze Beverages”). More worrying was the fact that in the month surrounding the festival, both No Depression and Harp magazines ceased publication. Dare we suggest one theoretical solution: “Spin magazine, brought to you by Miller High Life: The Champagne of Beers.”

FLOOR TOMS ARE THE NEW BLACK
In rock ‘n’ roll, the singers get the girls while the drummers are rewarded with a sub-genre of jokes made at their expense. But at SXSW, it seems like everyone wants to be a drummer: artists ranging  from Swedish electro ingénue Robyn to Brit mod-rocker Joe Lean to LA noise-punks Health to Mexican Broken Social Scene buddies Chikita Violenta to Madchester revivalists Working for a Nuclear Free City all had a second floor-tom set up at the front of the stage for periodic bashing fits. Singers = frustrated drummers — who knew? (Well, aside from Kristin Gundred of promising San Diego soul-rock combo Grand Ole Party, who provides her band’s songs with both their seductively purring vocals and their steady backbeat.) Even bands with drummers playing full-sized kits are going tribal. From proggy beardy indie darlings Yeasayer to cheery, vaguely psychedelic newcomers The Ruby Suns, bands of the non-hippie persuasion are pounding out beats from beyond indie’s punk-rooted rhythms. It might be a reaction to once-obscure world music now being available via the internet or acts like M.I.A. using lots of programmed percussion, but either way, world rhythms haven’t had this much of a rock ‘n’ roll workout since Bo Diddley.

SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT LOUDS
For a new, excitable generation of indie-rockers — Toronto trio Born Ruffians, lovable Welsh glockenspielers Los Campesinos!, spastic LA synth-core crew The Mae Shi, string-swept Syracuse pop romantics Ra Ra Riot — the operating principle seems to be “all you need is lungs,” as they transform nearly every song into an occasion for a full-band bellow. Or maybe they’re just trying to make themselves heard over all the schmoozing. 

WIRED FOR SOUND
Ten years ago, the prevailing mantra was “turntables are the new guitars.” At this year’s SXSW, the “new guitar” appears to be “suitcases stuffed with effects pedals, synthetic drum pads and assorted electronic noisemakers, all connected in a spaghetti-like tangle of wires.” The science-fair set-up was utilized most effectively by Brooklyn duo High Places, who set lilting girl-group vocals to disorienting Congotronic grooves, and Bristol avant-tronica terrorists Fuck Buttons, who explore much darker, droning territory, shrieking through a Fisher Price toy microphone as if it were a direct line to Beelzebub. 

PUNX NOT DEAD
As much as SXSW is an incubator for the next next-big-things, the festival has historically given props to pops. This year’s veteran roll call included keynote speaker Lou Reed, a re-­energized R.E.M. and Clash co-founder Mick Jones’ new band Carbon/Silicon. But the most impressive showing from the alumni class came from reunited ’80s LA cow-punk patriarchs X, whose raw-powered March 15 televised performance at Bat Bar could shame most bands half their age. And the rape ‘n’ roll rave-up “Johnny Hit and Run Pauline” is still, like, the creepiest song ever.

MAKING THE INDIE KIDS DANCE
One thing is absolutely certain: as of this year, the dance-rock hybrid fostered by the DFA, The Rapture et al in the early ‘00s is deader than ska. Bands such as Chicago’s Mahjongg get asses shaking with fresh Italo disco sounds, but groups like the UK’s Does It Offend You, Yeah? have bled the electro-punk-funk thing dry, offering little more than Neanderthal bass lines and boorish antics. Hint: if you’re a dance-rock band and you have to repeatedly tell your audience when to dance, you’re in trouble.

MAKING THE DANCE KIDS INDIE
While sirens like Robyn, Lykke Li and soon-to-be-ubiquitous ragga-soul temptress Santogold continued to lure indie-rockers to the poptimist playfield, some artists were coaxing the neon-hat party set over to the slam pit — none more so than Baltimore brats/Dan Deacon comrades Death Set, whose uproarious March 12 set at Emo’s Jr. had both black dudes in visors and chubby white beardos bum-rushing the stage to their robotic Ramones thrash. 

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