930 Forums
=> GENERAL DISCUSSION => Topic started by: kurosawa-b/w on October 13, 2004, 11:03:00 pm
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Anyone else heading to NYC for the marathon this weekend? I'm looking for recommendations for Friday night. I have a couple shows in mind but am wondering if I am overlooking any brilliant bands.
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sigh, if only things were a little different, BigYawn, meaning me, would be up there. Oh well, have fun!
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i'm not sure, but isn't brendan benson playing on friday?
i would be at cmj if not for class..
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Hmm...looking at Friday's schedule (http://www.cmj.com/marathon/schedule.php?view=venueday&day=15&month=10), I'd check out:
- Bad Wizard
- Cub Country
- Pinback
- TV on the Radio
- Beauty Pill
- VHS or Beta
- Robbers on High Street
- The Faint
And don't miss the Twilight Singers on Saturday at Irving Plaza! :)
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you probably saw but the High Strung are playing friday as well
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Originally posted by pollard:
you probably saw but the High Strung are playing friday as well
With the Capitol Years and the Carlsonics...though you don't really need to see the Carlsonics in NYC, do you.
Have a great time; I'm envious, but have been out of town too much of late to head out again.
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Human Television are playing an instore at Gigantic Music (http://www.giganticmusic.com/shows.htm) on Saturday.
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Originally posted by Bags:
Originally posted by pollard:
you probably saw but the High Strung are playing friday as well
With the Capitol Years and the Carlsonics...though you don't really need to see the Carlsonics in NYC, do you.
Have a great time; I'm envious, but have been out of town too much of late to head out again. [/b]
Oops, show I was talking about is on Saturday, not Friday:
The Carlsonics
Saturday, October 16th
@ Siberia
40th and 9th (Black Door Red Light)
1:00am
w/ The Capitol Years, The High Strung, & Tomorrow's Friend
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I went to the Mercury Lounge last night and saw Richard Buckner, The Rosebuds(who were pretty good) and Lou Barlow. Not sure if I'm going to see any one tonight and I'm leaving Friday.
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I went to CMJ back in 1996 and got to see the Red House Painters and the Bluetones. That was my first trip to NYC and I had an absolute blast. :)
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I know you asked about Friday, but there is a band playing this Saturday (at 9 p.m. at The Luna Lounge) that I've seen before and really liked.
They are called The Fashion. Perhaps you have already planned on checking them out ... Just thought I would mention them. :)
Cheers
DJ Medusa.
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Thanks for all the suggestions! There are about 5 different shows I want to see tonight. I will make it to two (at Webster Hall & Sin-e). Tomorrow night, I may go to the Continental show. Still undecided. And Saturday, I am going to a matinee show at Pianos with The Organ, Controller.Controller and Uncut. Unfortunately, I have to head back to DC that evening, so I will miss the Saturday night shows (including Singapore Sling -argh!).
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Since you are going tonight, I'd recommend Snatches of Pink, The Talk and Elevator Action at Acme Underground.
Originally posted by kurosawa-b/w:
There are about 5 different shows I want to see tonight.
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Definitely try to check out Uncut! I'm really loving them lately!
Haven't looked at the schedule yet but if possible, try to see The Broken Spindles too but not at the expense of missing a sure hit with you.
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If you are up for some poetry, you might want to check out Taylor Mead before he kicks it. He was one of the Warhol gang and was the guy in the last sequence of Cigarettes and Coffee. The guy who did...then.
John Wolfington could be good but probably too Folky or laid back for you.
You might like Death From Above 1979. Some of their music I really like and some is too Metalish for me but they aren't a Metal band.
I highly recommend Devotchka!!! Good Indie Rock with a few cerebral nuances.
The Everyothers might be good too...unless I am confusing them with another band called something like The Everyones. Not sure if they are the same band I'm thinking of or if I'm just confused with the name.
Dirty On Purpose would be a band I'd love to see as their song Cheat Death is one of my favorites lately but a few others are still a bit new bandish sounding. NYC sorta Shoegazish in the Asobie Seksu vain but not quite as Poppy.
(I'm leaving out some obvious ones that I know you already know about or probably wouldn't like.)
Controller, Controller might be interesting but I know there are too many others to see that I wouldn't bother.
The Crimea have some new material out that isn't too bad. Standard Indie.
Oh, crap! The Rolling Blackouts (not to be confused with another good band called The Blackouts) at Plaid!!! Perfect with The Von Bondies. Unfortunately, I just missed them at The Ottobar this past Monday night with Fu Manchu. Did anyone go and how were they? Keep your ears opened for them Kosmo. Very good rocking Garage Rock!
The Hentchmen would be a great band for Kosmo, Snailhook and I to see for a great 60s Garage fix.
Raising The Fawn should be a good show. Basically, the same guys as Broken Social Scene and Apostle Of Hustle (who I am coincidentally listening to now.) Canadians.
I would love to see Broken Spindles to see how they are live. I like the songs from them I hear on the radio.
Hope that you get to somehow see this before you go out on the town. Have a blast!!! ;)
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October 16, 2004
MUSIC REVIEW | CMJ MUSIC MARATHON
Feeling Hyper, Indie Rock Casts Off Its Slacker Image
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
othing short of teleportation and time travel would make it possible to hear more than a tiny percentage of the 978 bands booked for this year's CMJ Music Marathon. The annual convention is devoted to music aimed at college radio and, from there, the world. It continues through tonight with simultaneous shows at 41 clubs in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Hoboken, each with bills of up to 13 bands playing brief sets.
At a time when the recording business warns that its decreased profits are lessening the incentive for people to write music, the flood of bands is a reminder that musicians haven't stopped trying. For a critic, it's also a challenge: how to deal with the onslaught? One method is to make purely arbitrary rules. On the first two nights of the marathon, I decided to stick to bands I'd never heard and rule out any band describing itself as a genre. As it turned out, there was plenty of good new music around. Five bands - Kid Dakota, Pidgeon, An Albatross, the Dears and Brazilian Girls - were first-rate finds.
My sampling pointed toward one conclusion: indie rock's old slacker image is vanishing. In the era of hip-hop and the Internet, there's no such thing as a non sequitur. Songs can jump anywhere in a second. The better bands were hyperactive and musically overstuffed, packing their brief appearances with ideas, noise and showmanship.
Kid Dakota, from Minneapolis, pumped up what might have been modest singer-songwriter fare. Its leader, Darren Jackson, has the kind of buoyant pop tenor that once carried Top 40 pop hits.
But Kid Dakota came on as a duo with electric guitar and drums, blaring the songs with stark power chords and tolling drones while the drummer made hilarious faces. Pidgeon, from San Francisco, was a patchwork of introspection and demolition. Its songs jumped from folky melodies, with Valerie Iwamasa singing over intricately fingerpicked guitars, to bottom-scraping, distorted grunge with screamed vocals, to punky three-guitar frenzies. In one song, a guitarist played the arpeggios of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata; soon afterward, Ms. Iwamasa was singing about the end of the world, and the guitars were bearing down on glissandi that heaved like tsunamis. The speed, screaming vocals, jolting transitions and brief songs of hard-core were just starters for An Albatross, from Philadelphia, which put out an eight-minute, 11-song EP earlier this year. Instead of guitar, An Albatross has two keyboards in the foreground. So its riffs kept veering toward a circuslike oom-pah or blippy electro, putting some comedy behind the shrieked, unintelligible vocals of Ed Geida as he contorted across the stage. The songs whipsawed so quickly that nothing had time to become shtick.
The Dears, from Montreal, poured on sincerity in love songs that Murray Lightburn delivered with touches of the Smiths and soul singing.
Then there were the Brazilian Girls, a New York band with its ears everywhere. Mixing electronics with a live rhythm section, it hopped from carnival rhythms to four-on-the-floor club beats to ska. But it never took a style as fixed, scrambling genres instead. Sabina Sciubba sang in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, with glimmers of Bjork and Gwen Stefani, but she had her own showy, seductive spirit. She arrived swathed in white fabric, then revealed her face to show she had masking-tape X's over her eyes, and she had new slinky, giddy moves for each song.
Catchy, musically ambitious and proudly theatrical, the Brazilian Girls were irresistible, part of a happily glutted CMJ Music Marathon.
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Originally posted by Random Citizen:
And don't miss the Twilight Singers on Saturday at Irving Plaza! :)
Here's a review from a Jersey paper:
TS @ CMJ (http://www.summerskiss.com//nyc_101604_review_njcom.php)
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October 18, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A Draining Week in the Indie-Music Spotlight
By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times
All right," said Win Butler, sizing up the crowd late last Wednesday night at the Mercury Lounge. "We're the flavor of the month. Let's go."
And they went. A single guitar chord oozed through the speakers, and four of Mr. Butler's band mates joined him at the front of the stage, singing a wordless, full-throated overture while the drummer behind them kept time. Then the crashing subsided and Mr. Butler started to sing, his voice wild and shaky with half-swallowed terror. "Somethin' filled up my heart with nothin', someone told me not to cry," he began, with a violin line swelling and deflating behind him. And a crowd full of ecstatic fans and converts braced itself for the next crash.
Hundreds and hundreds of indie-rock bands descended on New York City last week for the CMJ Music Marathon, an alt-rock expo that annexes Manhattan's nightclubs once a year. But none of them generated more excitement than this one: a brilliant, slanted Montreal-based septet called the Arcade Fire.
The debut Arcade Fire album, "Funeral," was released barely a month ago, on Sept. 14, by the indie label Merge, based in North Carolina. Enthusiastic reviews were written, even more enthusiastic blog entries were posted, MP3's circulated. It used to take months of touring and record-shop hype for an underground band to build a cult, but now it takes only a few weeks. "I'd like to thank the Internet," Mr. Butler said, and he wasn't serious, but he also wasn't wrong.
So the band's Wednesday night concert was one of the week's most exclusive shows: tickets sold out long in advance, and if you had showed up at the club bearing a $545 CMJ badge, you would have been (politely) directed to wait in line.
Even so, the seven members of the Arcade Fire managed to exceed all expectations - the group's live show is much rowdier and more unhinged than the album. During "Neighborhoods #2 (Laïka)," Mr. Butler's younger brother, Will, joined forces with the band's mad scientist, Richard Reed Parry, and they picked up drumsticks to beat on whatever was closest: ceiling pipes, amplifiers, glockenspiels, each other. Régine Chassagne, the band's riveting co-lead singer, squeezed out an accordion line alongside Sarah Neufeld's violin. And Win Butler yelped a frantic, fractured story: "Our older brother, bit by a vampire! For a year we caught his tears in a cup! And now we're gonna make him drink it! Come on, Alex, don't die or dry up!"
Before the concert ended there was a nimble but fearsome ode to Haiti (where Ms. Chassagne's parents come from); a sad but true tale about a keyboard ("Our piano fell out of the back of our U-Haul today," Mr. Parry explained); and a friendly physical confrontation: the night was over when Mr. Butler cheerfully wrestled Mr. Parry to the ground.
Twelve hours later, on Thursday afternoon, the band members could be found in the East Village, on the corner of 10th Street and First Avenue. Their destination was the Russian and Turkish Baths, a few feet away, but before they could get there they were stopped twice by East Villagers who wanted to congratulate them for the previous night's show. They smiled and kept moving, and soon all seven were ensconced inside the one of the hottest rooms on the East Coast, letting sweat seep through their rented shorts.
At its worst, the CMJ Music Marathon is an exhausting thicket of half-empty showcases and bogus promotional ventures. So it helps to be the Arcade Fire. That is, it helps to be "the flavor of the month," the band everyone's talking about, the band that gets summoned to dinner (as happened on Friday night) by Seymour Stein, the founder of Sire Records. It also helps to be the kind of band that's determined to turn a week of music-biz overload into yet another weird adventure. When Ms. Chassagne, Ms. Neufeld and Mr. Parry discovered that one of the smaller saunas was also an effective reverb chamber, they unnerved an unsuspecting fellow bather by trying out a three-part chorale, which became a five-part chorale when the Butler brothers showed up.
The different parts of the Arcade Fire were assembled slowly and sometimes painfully over the past few years. Win Butler, who was raised in Texas, came to Montreal as a student, and he met Mr. Parry when he put up a flier that said, more or less, "I have this house where you can make a lot of noise and nobody cares." Ms. Neufeld emerged from Montreal's fertile electronica scene to become the band's one-woman string section. And Ms. Chassagne, an autodidactical polyinstrumentalist (her early piano education included time spent studying a composer named Nintendo, famous for his classic, "Super Mario Bros."), was suspicious of Mr. Butler at first: she remembers thinking, "Oh, this is just another bimbo guy who wants to play me a song." But he must have grown on her, because last summer she married him.
An early incarnation of the band holed up in Maine to record a sketchy but enthralling mini album. You can hear a few songs from it at www.newmusiccanada.com, (http://www.newmusiccanada.com,) where the band also lists four major influences: Debussy, Neil Young, the Pixies and Alvino Rey, the late steel guitar virtuoso who happens to be the Butlers' grandfather. By the time the group recorded "Funeral," members had come and gone (the band nearly broke up more than once), and the music had likewise expanded and splintered.
"Funeral" is a scruffy epic, with 10 interlocking songs united by overlapping themes and sounds: the sharp thwack of Howard Bilerman's drum kit (he has since been replaced by Jeremy Gara), the slow-motion bass lines by Tim Kingsbury, the elegiac melodies that seep out in sobs and spasms, the intensifying instrumental passages that gather momentum slowly but ruthlessly.
Throughout, Mr. Butler and Ms. Chassagne sing about proud characters humbled by storms and fire and violence. Mr. Butler says his obsession with thunder and lightning is really an obsession with helplessness: "Like, oh, there's an ice storm in Montreal, and there's no power for a week. I think people interact differently in those situations they have no control over - it could be weather, it could be war." You get the same feeling from Ms. Chassagne's wild-eyed warble, whether she's evoking the madness of Haiti's Tonton Macoutes or repeating a puzzling, intoxicating elegy: "Alice died in the night/I've been learning to drive my whole life."
The band members' visit to the Russian and Turkish baths may have been the last time they relaxed all week. Later that night they headed to Midtown to play a brief set at the Museum of Television and Radio, to be broadcast on the Seattle alt-rock station KEXP. (Will Butler was gently reprimanded for using an invaluable old radio poster as a rhythm instrument.) The next day, Friday, they suffered through three photo shoots in a single afternoon, and by Saturday afternoon they were installed at Arlene Grocery, the Lower East Side club, for their third CMJ performance in four days.
It was a chaotic show, thanks largely to a pair of obstreperous (and seemingly untune-able) guitars; Mr. Parry declared it the worst Arcade Fire show ever, although Ms. Neufeld disagreed. Needless to say, the crowd loved it anyway (except for those poor people stuck outside on Stanton Street). And as the band began a cracked but still-lovely rendition of "Une année sans lumière," with guitars glimmering to match the bilingual lyrics, Mr. Butler said goodbye to this year's CMJ Marathon. "We've never done one of these doodads before," he announced. "It's been" - a pause, the faint outline of a smile - "fine."
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I had a great time at CMJ. It was the usual mix of fantastic and disappointing bands. But being surrounded by fellow music enthusiasts and creators is always exciting. I'm exhausted though. Those multi-band showcases wear you out!
Uncut (http://www.thenewviolence.com) was the definite highlight of the weekend for me. They played a terrific set on Saturday. They should be coming to DC in December.
Oh and I finally made it to Pianos and Sin-e for the first time. I really liked both clubs. Mercury Lounge still has the best sound, I think, but I liked the size of the smaller clubs.
P.S. I disagree with that reviewer about The Dears. I just can't get into them. The vocals ruin the tunes for me.
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I hope the Dears make it big. Then I can tell the story about the time he was puking in the Black Cat bathroom after they played.