Category Archives: CMJ2008

live: the sundelles, browns, the muslims; union pool, 10.26.08

Sunday night — a couple of hours ago, actually — I stopped by Union Pool for a 1928 Recordings showcase. I’d heard solid things from a few friends about The Muslims, who were headlining and figured, hey, seemed like a fine idea. Spoiler alert — it was. Sunday nights post-CMJ are always interesting — though crowds may be tired, I’ve seen some fine shows on the day after the festival proper, but this may have been the first to actually get my fist pumping. (Literally.)

The Sundelles took the stage first: a trio, looking unabashedly like three dudes who make pop music. My first take on their fuzzed-out sound was to invoke the likes of Henry’s Dress; after a few songs, though, some dissonance crept in, some subtle stops and starts, and my points of reference shifted. I’m kind of thinking that The Sundelles make music that sounds like Unrest‘s Imperial F.F.R.R. if Mark Robinson had come of age in the East Bay punk rock scene.

Playing second were Browns, another power trio, whose opener sounded a bit like one of The Pixies’ more sprawling numbers run through a rockabilly filter. The pace quickened from there, though their set sounded to me like the briefest of the night. I caught something of a Rick Froberg (i.e. Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes) element to their sound — barreling, intense, noisy. I did find myself enjoying the more expansive side that they showed at their start of their set, though — I haven’t yet heard their album, but I’ll be curious to hear whether those elements of their sound are more prominent there.

The Muslims closed out the night. A few months ago, I talked about seeing Ponytail, and how their live show involved elements of both ecstasy and danger. That sort of tension was definitely present all throughout The Muslims’ set: while on paper, some aspects of their sound might seem similar to, say, caUSE co-MOTION!, the ends to which they put those sounds are radically different. Their set began strong, with a taut, fairly traditional rock setup played well; occasional guitar leads offered up assorted potential influences: some surf here, some rockabilly there. As the songs progressed towards their conclusions, though, those influences seemed to burn away, revealing something much more raw beneath. Three or four songs into their set, they played a song that sounded like a dirtied-up, garage-rock rewrite of — I swear — Catherine Wheel’s “Show Me Mary”; a few songs after that, the song where they “took it down a notch” proved to be full of menace, an ominous slow-burn. The first of the two songs that closed out their set prompted most of the crowd to sing along; the second found the guitar and rhythms becoming more and more frenzied before an abrupt ending. Eventually the band was coaxed back onto the stage, where they covered Spiritualized’s “Walking With Jesus” — it seemed as good a way to end the night as anything.

And it seemed indicative of something that the live highlights of the past few days for me took place in smaller rooms, eardrums askew, jarred by rhythms and inspired to motion.

live: the dutchess and the duke, the end of the world, emmy the great; pianos, 10.25.08 / the end of the world; glasslands, 10.25.08

Back upstairs at Pianos on Saturday afternoon, for a day party booked by Bowery Presents.

I’ve now seen The Dutchess and the Duke five times in 2008, in spaces ranging from basements to mid-sized theaters, playing guitars electric and acoustic. The sound I found so bracing initially has only gotten tighter — there’s a force to Jesse Lortz and Kimberly Morrison’s vocals in tandem that’s powerfully compelling, and each show I hear turns up more nuances, whether grim lyrical humor or interweaving melodies. They pretty much killed it, playing with far more intensity than you might expect from a Saturday afternoon party with a fairly laid-back crowd.

Up next were The End of the World, playing the first of three Saturday sets. I might have to reconsider my earlier assertion that the group seems to be evolving in a more conventionally rock direction: despite the fullness of their guitar sound and the added presence of pedal steel, what made both the Pianos set and a later one at Glasslands compelling was how certain traditional elements were recombined. You have vocals, drums, bass, guitar — sure. The guitars get loud, the vocals build, the pedal steel accentuates. But the payoffs happen in different places; despite familiar elements, they’re not necessarily a verse/chorus/verse-oriented group. At Pianos, playing on a borrowed drum kit that encountered some problems, the results were solid. At Glasslands, their sound became more resonant, fuller –

Following The End of the World at Pianos was Emmy the Great. Brooklyn Vegan had a quick blurb up on her music that I’d seen pre-festival which strikes me as relatively spot-on. One of the first bits of banter to be heard during the set mentioned a Lightspeed Champion set later that night, and I picked up a similar lyrical sensibility here: self-aware, hyper-literate, and fairly charming. Musically, I was reminded of late-80s Billy Bragg (see also: the autopsy-level examinations of relationships), and one song invoked Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” a la Okkervil River’s incorporations of “Sloop John B” and “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember”. (I know Okkervil River weren’t the first to do this, but that’s what’s freshest in my mind right now.) All of it was done well, though at times the lyrical style veered a little closely into clever territory for my tastes.

live: pretty & nice, the coathangers; pianos, 10.24.08

Upstairs at Piano’s, Friday night: the Hardly Art / Suicide Squeeze / Sub Pop showcase. The downstairs component is well-reviewed by Marc Hogan for Pitchfork, and includes a photo of Steve from Blood City joining Oxford Collapse onstage. (That’s two-thirds of a Coup Fourre reunion, fellas…)

During said Oxford Collapse set, Adam commented that the upstairs show had the feeling of a DIY punk show. That would have been true even before Atlanta’s The Coathangers threw balloons, and later confetti, into the crowd, adding to a general sense of enthusiastic chaos.

I’ve written before about Pretty & Nice in this space, and both their upstairs show and a show the next night at The Charleston in Brooklyn found them in good form: both the jarringly noisy and reassuringly catchy sides of the band were in full display. Topping it off was some good, surreal stage banter, including an offhand reference to rain dance music, and an offhand number called “Life on Mars?” that was, emphatically, not the David Bowie song of the same name.

The Coathangers took a little longer to click for me. Their roots are pretty clearly in punk, and their basslines are bold, but for a group that’s capable of some nice onstage rage and vitriol (some of the vocals took me back to my misspent hardcore youth), there’s a kind of sidearm quality to their music. They aren’t necessarily out to steamroll you or prompt frenzied dancing — there’s both a cerebral element to their music and something more visceral present. Which, paradoxically, removes a little of the immediacy that one might get from a band playing with such intensity. By the end of their set, I found myself impressed, but still somewhat detached — much like my reaction to Women earlier in the week, I’m just as curious to hear where they take this sound as I am to take in their set the next time they’re in New York.

live: adept, women; cakeshop, 10.22.08

Belated CMJ blogging, you may ask? It begins here. Wednesday night found me briefly at Cakeshop, there to see Alberta’s Women, whose disc on Jagjaguwar has been gratifying my noisepop receptors a lot lately. The night was hosted by the Dutch magazine/collective Subbacultcha!, and I walked in partway through a set from their countrymen Adept. The press release I got for the show invokes, among others, Liars, Suicide, and The Knife. I think I can see that, though their set wasn’t really my thing: in their favor, they were going pretty much bonkers on stage, and the crowd was definitely supportive. The relentlessly pounding beat they had behind them was less to my liking, and overall, the noise/punk/dance fusion sound that they going on reminded me of a less interesting A Luna Red.

Women’s album heads into noisy places while keeping a pop structure in place. While the same thing could be said about other bands of whom I’m fond — Oxford Collapse, Parts & Labor — Women, at least on record, opt for a more disparate approach, taking a more classically pop sound and incorporating noise as a prominent element. Live, the pop aspects of their sound take precedence — which may make for a less challenging listening experience, but also a more easygoing one. Overall, the group played a fair number of shows in the city during the festival; I only caught the one, but I’m curious to hear where their sound evolves from here, and whether the live experience or their recorded one will inform album number two.