Floating around the internets today is a seemingly genuine story about how a band called Fucked Up is being sued by an energy drink company for talking smack about them. You might even, if you didn’t know better, try to interpolate from the audio of their ’surprise’ tribute to fallen Jay Reatard on the street during SXSW some sort of corporate malignancy.

If you were following a few weeks back, we ventured out to Austin, TX for South by Southwest Music Festival, which is more of an industry confab than a festival but a party nevertheless. We saw tons of music and met loads of folks, and there were a few highlights or as we called them “highlights of hype” which were seen daily through the portals of Twitter, Facebook and many many blogs (including this one). One moment was central to the SXSW experience of late…

Dirty Projectors have it all: the akimbo folk soul of Jeff Buckley, iconoclastic pop deconstruction a la Panda Bear, irresistibly ethereal, strange harmonies recalling School of Seven Bells, surprisingly effective ethnic cops evoking their Ivy League peers in Vampire Weekend – and contender for possibly album of 2009 in the band’s latest release, Bitte Orca.

America is nothing if not the land of endless options. The idea is that any possible variation of, well, anything is available for a price. Case in point: whoever decided that “indie rockers” would respond to one of the saddest workout tapes this side of “Warm Up With Traci Lords.” Granted, the entertainment value of tatted-up girls with ratty hair and smudged eyeliner working up a sweat on a stage set that looks like a rock club is pretty high.