“Saying the Unsayable” was an “investigation into the role of lyrics in popular song.” Jarvis Cocker, dressed as dapper as ever in a jacket and tie, stood in front of the eager crowd crammed into the small convention room, and armed with a slide/video projector and a long pointer, as he presented a near-two-hour lecture on the importance of lyrics. And if anyone should know about the value of lyrics, it’s Cocker, arguably one of the greatest British lyricists of the last two decades. “Everything expressed is solely based on my subjective opinion,” Cocker said in his opening, “but I’m usually right.”

Elliott Brood is a Toronto trio who dress like old-timey rural undertakers and play a stripped down, highly rhythmic brand of roots music with endearing energy, a particularly impressive feat at 3 p.m. in a darkened exhibition hall in the Austin Convention Center.

A boisterous set by Auckland quartet Cut Off Your Hands–one of the 10 shows they played at this edition of SXSW–was the centerpiece of another strange bill at Emo’s on Thursday night, wedged in between the refined, reggae-fied rock of Sean Bones and the trendy indie tropes of Boston’s Passion Pit. Topping the bill were Swedish whistling champions Peter Bjorn and John, whose delayed and ultimately disastrous set (due to epic technical fail) they later described as “awful.”

Echo and the Bunnymen’s first of three SXSW shows wrapped up an odd bill at Emo’s main room, featuring Cali punks Circle Jerks and Juliette Lewis’s latest band, The New Romantiques–her attempts to channel Janis Joplin and their hard blues rock by numbers bored most of us to tears.

Treasure Island. There it sits in the middle of San Francisco bay. To most of us it’s rarely set foot upon, simply driven through, the halfway point on the Bay Bridge. It was built and pirate- and/or Stevenson-named in 1939 as the site of the World’s Fair-esque “Golden Gate International Exposition.” Since then it’s been a lot of things, among them a naval base and site of the Battlebots television show, in which machines battled to a fiery death. Apparently, people live there, too.

Lowlights are a six-piece rock band that give off a folk/country vibe with a slight psychedelic tinge. I would compare them to contemporaries Oakley Hall, but with more of a haunting, low-key Western feel than the Brooklyn band.

Tegan and Sara packed Amoeba Records’ Hollywood store to capacity and then some, with a line of fans stretching down Sunset Blvd. and around the corner, for their in-store on Tuesday night.

It seems like Built to Spill has been on the road forever. After canceling the initial round of live dates in support of 2006’s You In Reverse due to frontman Doug Martsch’s emergency surgery to repair a detached retina, the band has been making up for lost time.

Now, I got into Battles because of drummer John Stanier, who was a hero to me in Helmet when I was first starting to play in bands in the early ’90s. Little did I know that I was about to walk into a drumfest at theLaunchpad. I got there quite a bit early to hang out alone and have a few beers—alone time being at a premium with a new son. After several PBRs and a few games of Ms. Pacman, Ponytail took the stage.