The Canadians played an unusually strong hand at this year’s SXSW, highlighted by several showcases from the dramatically hard rocking quartet Pilate. Lead singer Todd Clark’s pleading, tortured vocals recall early Bono, although the rest of the band feels more like Coldplay. The lyrics about snow, imagery evoking cold hands, gray shadows and white meadows certainly sound Canadian enough, but Clark somehow manages to make his placid homeland seem like Belfast or Beirut in these paranoid fantasies of flight, hiding and yearning for translucence, which is quite an accomplishment in itself. One wonders what this band’s songs will sound like if something really bad happens to them.