The SXSW festival will be held in Austin from March 12th through 16th, featuring FAR too many acts to list here. It’s an excellent venue to discover new artists from a large array of genres or to catch your favorite bands before they get huge, sell out and you bitch about how you liked them before everyone else liked them.

If you’re like most of us, though - you won’t be able to make it. Fear not, for the SXSW event has posted hundreds of tracks for your aural pleasure - 765, to be exact. In previous years these tracks have been available as a Torrent download. For unknown reasons there was no torrent this year, rather they posted links to all files individually. However, some enterprising chap has done the dirty work of compiling all of them into a torrent which weighs in at a hefty 3.4 gigs.

So clear some space on your hard drive and grab the mother lode. As the styles range from straight up rock to world sound, country to reggaeton, you’re bound to come across tracks you don’t like and some you’ll love. And if for some reason that’s not enough, the linked page also has past years’ torrents posted as well.

Keep in mind - as many of these folks are new on the scene and trying to ‘make it’, supporting them is important.

You know that feeling, when you’ve been in a long music slump, when nothing really strikes your fancy? Weeks if you’re lucky, months or years if you’re not.

Then one day you put on your headphones, click ‘play’ on an artist you’ve never heard of before, ready to classify it as either ‘mediocre‘ or ‘please-God-never-again‘… and it is fucking fantastic. It is everything you have been looking for. It is getting steak when you ordered a hamburger. It is being upgraded to first class when you bought a ticket for steerage. It is exactly what you’ve been looking for and makes the past weeks, months or years of grinding through merely-satisfactory tracks all the worthwhile.

Behold, Walter Meego. When this indie-electro-pop-ish group performed last year at the SXSW festival, I was turned on to their latest EP (at the time) “Keyhole“. I will admit that this particular track does have a bit of quirk factor to it, specifically the vocal track. But I tend to like quirk and this track grows on me more with each listen. Nice electro beats and extra points for the use of a slightly out of tune upright piano.

Walter Meego - Keyhole

Fast forward to this year’s SXSW festival, and we learn that this trio (or duo + live performer) from Chicago is planning - finally! - a full album release called Voyager. You can really hear a progression of their work when comparing the earlier Keyhole to this new track, titled Forever. There’s more layers to their sound now and it seems they’ve really found ‘their place’. For me, it’s a perfect mix of a unique lead voice, a great beat, plenty of knob-tweaking and filters, and even a throwback to the 80’s with that guitar rift. This song has really lifted me out of my musical malaise. We need more music like this. And we will, on May 27th, when Voyager hits the shelves, courtesy of Almost Gold Records.

Walter Meego - Forever

Can’t wait? There’s a few more tracks on their MySpace page and of course there’s always iTunes.

Finally, if you happen to to be in the area for the SXSW festival (lucky!), you can catch them at the following locations:

03/12: The Parish (Almost Gold Recordings Showcase)
03/13: Creekside Lounge
03/14: Beauty Bar
03/14: Urban Outfitters