Musical Passport

5 international acts guaranteed to make waves at Austin City Limits Festival

Austin City Limits Music Festival has the difficult job of giving Austin musicians their fair shot at fame while simultaneously attracting noteworthy acts from across the globe. It's that down-home appeal the brand has maintained for more than a decade, though, that consistently draws in a smattering of standout artists from beyond U.S. borders — and 2013 will be no different.

We're not talking about the obvious choices – Phoenix, Muse, Atoms for Peace, The Arctic Monkeys and so on. These are the international artists to catch between the headlining acts, from indie crooners to psych-rock legends in the making:

Jake Bugg
Nottingham, England
Watch: "Two Fingers"

If he lived in Austin, he'd be an anti-mainstream darling. Having recently called Mumford & Sons "posh farmers with banjos," Jake Bugg has won over the likes of spitfire and fellow Brit Noel Gallagher. When he was just 19 years old, the unique highs and lows of his voice and nostalgic Brit-twang style thrust him out of high school (where he generally just cut class and smoked cigarettes) and into the spotlight.

Friday, October 4 | 5-5:45 pm, Austin Ventures Stage
Friday, October 11 | 5-5:45 pm, Austin Ventures Stage

Dan Croll
Liverpool, England
Watch: "From Nowhere"

Dan Croll earned rave reviews during this year's South by Southwest Music festival and turned heads as your standard hip, glasses-wearing, good-hair-having indie artist du jour. Looking beyond the buzz, you'll find that he cut his teeth as a musician in high school, training at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, founded by Paul McCartney. Croll's music can be described as electronic singer-songwriter (what combination isn't there these days?), with much of it grooving bombastically in all the right places. He does, however, occasionally go back to his roots, letting his falsetto shine against a single acoustic guitar.

Saturday, October 5 | 12:15-1 pm, AMD Stage
Saturday, October 12 | 12:15-1 pm, Lady Bird Stage

Little Green Cars
Dublin, Ireland
Watch: "Harper Lee"

Beautiful harmonies by a beautiful quintet of young Dubliners. Fittingly enough, Little Green Cars recently supported Jake Bugg on his 2013 UK tour. The band's tracks are robust and emotionally charged (as one would expect of a catalog of songs written by musicians between the ages of 16 and 20). Little Green Cars' debut album was produced by Markus Dravs, who also lent a hand on Arcade Fire's influential Neon Bible.

Saturday, October 5 | 4:30-5:15 pm, Austin Ventures Stage
Saturday, October 12 | 4:30-5:15 pm, Austin Ventures Stage

Tame Impala
Perth, Australia
Watch: "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards"

Tame Impala rose to prominence with its second album, Lonerism, which delivers a steady, unconfined, rolling ride of psychedelic rock. Led by Kevin Park, who writes and records almost all Tame Impala tracks alone, the band set out with the intention of crafting a sound that would be the opposite of the sharp, angular rhythms of today's popular dance rock. Still, it's pretty groovy and has all the makings of a powerful live show, especially when coupled with the hypnotic artwork the band projects onstage during performances. According to Rolling Stone, Tame Impala is a better live band than Tool.

Sunday, October 6 | 6:30-7:30 pm, Honda Stage
Sunday, October 13 | 6:30-7:30 pm, Honda Stage

Junip
Stockholm, Sweden
Watch: "Rope and Summit"

Frontman Jose Gonzalez has certainly made strides as a solo artist, and his trio Junip has enjoyed modest success with a worldwide tour in support of its 2010 debut album Fields. There has always been a quiet, beautiful discomfort to Gonzalez's projects, and this year's self-titled Junip is no different. The melodic psych-folk guided by Gonzalez's even-keeled voice is, as Pitchfork so perfectly said, "music for making dinner or babies" — and there's nothing wrong with that.

Saturday, October 5 | 3-4 pm, Honda Stage
Saturday, October 12 | 3-4 pm, Honda Stage

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Austin City Limits Festival takes place October 4-6 and October 11-13 in Zilker Park in Austin. You can purchase tickets online.

Dan Croll is among the up-and-comers from overseas making waves at this year's ACL Fest.

Photo courtesy of Dan Croll

Dan Croll is among the up-and-comers from overseas making waves at this year's ACL Fest.

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Movie Review

New film I Want Your Sex somehow makes kinky activity boring

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut - Three Bewildered People in the Night - in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest - his first film in 12 years - he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.

Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).

Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.

It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.

The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.

The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.

A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention - and failing at even that.

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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.