These things are rare, but if you were in the right spot for 25 minutes at SXSW 2010, you no longer felt like you were in the middle of a chaotic industry clusterfuck. This was in Buffalo Billiards, a cheesed-out pool hall on 6th street, chaotic-clusterfuck ground zero, but there's a decent chance that the three women onstage didn't know what a chaotic clusterfuck even was, that they'd banished even the idea of it from their souls. Those three women were Mountain Man, a folk group from Bennington, Vermont, and they pushed the whole Fleet Foxes thing as far as it could possibly go by eliminating any extraneous instrumentation and basically just doing campfire singalongs onstage in front of us. They mostly sang a cappella, with one of them occasionally plucking at a guitar, and they said, during the show, that it was the first time they'd ever sung into microphones. (The mere fact that a band could land an SXSW without previously using microphones was, and is, just mind-bogglng.) They didn't face the audience when they sang; they faced each other. They started the show with a group hug. I think they may have been barefoot. The whole thing was so utterly endearing, so devoid of pretense. And the way they sang, in warm and intimate and guileless folk harmony, was just entrancing. Now, four years later, one of those three women is singing over electronic clicks and whirrs and thumps, sometimes through Auto-Tune -- a surprising turnaround, to say the least. But she's kept that same intimate, wide-eyed energy, that weird basic purity. Listening to Amelia Meath on her side project Sylvan Esso's self-titled debut, it's easy to imagine her still on that stage, singing to her friends, not quite sure how to hold a microphone right. She's let the world in, but she hasn't let it fundamentally change what she's doing.