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Artist
The Texas Instruments
12+ albums
indiePost punk
about
One of the advantages of growing up musical in Texas is that you can play cowboy rock without getting all stupid and selfconscious about it. Austin's Texas Instruments don't waste a lot of time or fuss detailing their stylistic concepts, the unpretentious trio just gets on with it, delivering crisp post-punk songs in a distinctly regional dialect. Over a simple Southwestern backbeat, Dave Woody drops an occasional ZZ Top lick into his barbed wire guitar playing, the backbone of lyrically substantial, reasonably tuneful material. The Texas Instruments have sculpted a sustained and articulate body of work that stands in proud defiance — almost as if it were an indirectly proportional factor — of unprofitable tours, bad record company mojo and a low national profile. Even the locals became complacent: the last combo left standing among its ballyhooed Austin peers (True Believers, Zeitgeist, Glass Eye, Wild Seeds) became taken utterly for granted by most hometown clubgoers. (But there are probably people living down the block from the Louvre who've never seen the Mona Lisa, either.) Bassist Ron Marks gets recognized on the street sometimes, but only from his appearance in Slacker. Unlike books, you can judge a band by its cover(s). Early on, TI — then a trio of El Paso buddies Marks and Woody plus Lubbock-bred drummer Steve Chapman — tackled songs by the Minutemen, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. This de facto post-punk/folk/rock hybrid remains an accurate, if incomplete, model of
