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" &amp;quot;THAT&amp;#039;S a MUSTACHE!&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s a good sport, Zac Little. Little&amp;#039;s got the kind of bushy mustache that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday would&amp;#039;ve cocked an approving eyebrow at in the heyday of Tombstone. The rest of his look complements the majesty of it: he keeps his ginger hair short and sports a black suit jacket, shirt and vest. He wears a necklace and some simple rings, but nothing too ornamental. The mustache is front and center and the first thing people notice when they walk past him on 6th Street, and he smiles and high-fives the drunk kids back when they get a little too close for comfort in the madness of the South By Southwest crowds. In the stretch of Red River between 6th and 8th, the mustache is complimented, shouted about and emphatically gestured towards at least four times. It&amp;#039;s cool, though. He&amp;#039;s used to it. The attention his mustache is getting is one of the few familiar things about this whole experience, actually: Little&amp;#039;s band, Saintseneca, is having a very, very good year, one that really took off in October when material from their label debut on Anti-, Dark Arc, started making the rounds surrounding their first appearance at the CMJ Music Marathon. They went on tour with Against Me! for a spell. They came to Austin a few weeks before Dark Arc&amp;#039;s drop date to pop their SXSW cherry and give the new material a proper festival debut. It&amp;#039;s a year of firsts for Saintseneca, to be sure, and they&amp;#039;re seeing a handful of major career milestones materialize before their very eyes. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re always learning!&amp;quot; says Little, taking a seat at a beer garden overlooking the river. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like an ever-evolving thing. At every step, we&amp;#039;re figuring out how you want to set up our live show, how we want to deliver those songs, how we want to approach technical things in terms of sound. I would hope it never becomes a static thing where it&amp;#039;s like, &amp;#039;Okay, we&amp;#039;re here, we&amp;#039;ve done it.&amp;#039; Every moment is a process of becoming.&amp;quot; The din of 6th Street is reaching a fever pitch, but the solace of a dark beer a step or two away from it makes for a nice break, even if there&amp;#039;s a street performer cracking a whip at an audience and running a chainsaw just feet from the entrance of the bar. This is definitely the weirdest thing Little&amp;#039;s seen in Texas. For Dark Arc, Little found himself gravitating towards the bass \u2013 not typically his writing vehicle of choice \u2013 to craft a collection of songs that embrace the resounding heartbeat of the instrument. Dark Arc moves in a way that betrays the soft violin strings and steely acoustic twang Saintseneca employs, in that the intensity and inventive take on folk-friendly instrumentation pulsing throughout the record makes for a compelling rock-pop-folk hybrid. The body of work makes Saintseneca a genre chameleon, and it makes sense that they&amp;#039;d be able to rally and win over crowds of fans who came to see powerful, pop punk bands like Against Me! as easily as they would a packed living room full of friends at a house show in their native Columbus.  &amp;quot;That may seem like a trivial thing, writing on the bass,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But before that, we had never incorporated any electric instruments into what we did at all. Live, it was strictly acoustic. All of a sudden I liked to pick up the bass. The first thing I played was &amp;#039;Uppercutter&amp;#039; and instantly it was like, &amp;#039;This is what I need to be doing right now. I think one of the biggest challenges was figuring out, how do I reconcile the old kind of idea I had as far as what this band is and what it means to play in this band? Reconciling that with writing songs in a totally new way. Writing songs and playing the electric bass is a real departure even though the songwriting felt true to how I want to write. While the spirit of the songwriting and the approach is probably consistent in many ways, Dark Arc is something that branched out a lot more, sonically. A lot of our early recordings, the focus was just to capture something; it was a documentation of what we did live. With Dark Arc, it was almost the other way around: we wanted to create a recording that&amp;#039;s compelling, and then subsequently figured out how to play the songs live. We switched it around.&amp;quot; They did, and it&amp;#039;s working. Dark Arc is set to attract the exactly the same kind of attention the band&amp;#039;s mustachioed frontman of receives. In the meantime, a strong showing at SXSW and a bunch of high-fives are some great souvenirs from the first of their festival jaunts to Texas. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a27889/saint-seneca-sxsw/>