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.
