AUSTIN, Texas--Though they had beauty in common, the dark, moody music played by The Good, The Bad & The Queen Saturday afternoon just didn't fit with the gorgeous, sunny skies overhead.

Damon Albarn at SXSW.

That incongruity didn't matter one bit, though, as the Damon Albarn-fronted supergroup delighted the hipster crowd at the Fader Fort with a phenomenal set of dubby, lush downbeat--the kind that teases you with tension throughout and leaves you wanting more.

Albarn, the Blur frontman and Gorillaz mastermind, formed the group out of recording sessions he'd been doing with legendary Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and a group of session musicians. He recruited Verve guitarist Simon Tong and, after trying out several bass players, convinced renowned Clash bassist Paul Simonon to return to music for the first time in 15 years.

Nattily attired and with Albarn sporting a black top hat, the quartet was joined Saturday by a keyboardist and a string quartet, adding even more a cinematic quality to the sound. Albarn has called the project a look at modern life in his native UK, and the songs convey both Albarn's pride in and sadness about his homeland.

With the giant orb above, the song "Behind the Sun" best expressed the music's mood: "You got all love and war / When you are all uptight with fever inside / Let's get out / And if we can't do that what do you say / Let the past pass away / Into the dawn of another way of looking at / The people we've become / To a place where we played when / We were young on the cool breeze behind the sun."

Albarn has developed an incredible knack for crafting melodies that are new but sound familiar, most famously on the two smash-hit Gorillaz records. This time around, the melodies are there, but they're steeped in subtlety.

Damon Albarn and Paul Simonon at SXSW.

But it wasn't all gloom and brood on Saturday afternoon. As the set went on, the tempo picked up and the band began to give release to all that tension it had built up. Allen pounded out Afro beats on the drums, and Albarn played fluttering piano parts and chimed in on several tracks with funky melodica flourishes.

Simonon, meanwhile, looked like a man who had found the perfect project with which to make his return to music. He bounced across the stage at times like a prize fighter, rattling off monstrous dub reggae bass lines.

The set would have been better suited to a dark theater in which the moody music could wash over the audience, or even a basement club swaying to Simonon's thunderous bass. But with its own brand of beauty, this was music big enough to blot out the sun.