Following a suspicious number of placards appearing around Austin announcing new album Inter Alia – their first since their 2000 emo-punk landmark, Relationship of Command, At the Drive-In announced a surprise show at the House of Vans in Austin on Wednesday night.
At The Drive In
Playing to a capacity crowd, the band rifled through a set heavy on ROC bangers. Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez, who had expressed some reluctance about reuniting over the years, appeared to relish the moment, thanking numerous individuals throughout and Bixler-Zavala singling out the venue for special mention for “not calling the cops when we used the fire extinguisher last time we were here.”
At The Drive In
While the death-defying acrobatics from their younger days may well be behind them, the band found other ways of keeping the crowd’s attention rapt. Numerous ROC-era songs like “Enfilade” were given Mars Volta-like makeovers, their punk foundations pulled up by roots and twisted into gnarled new shapes.
At The Drive In
Toward the end of the set in (perhaps) one of the only nods to current events, Bixler-Zavala donned 3-D specs and asked if “anyone [had] taken so much acid that they thought they were in Russia?”
At The Drive In
At the Drive-In were never ones to be taken literally, but to their credit, the set was indeed pretty far out.
At The Drive In – SXSW 2017
