CMJ 2008, Day 5: Managing expectations

October 25, 2008, in NYC

By Liz Schroeter
Published: October 27th, 2008 | 2:35pm

Finally freed from the responsibilities of my day job, Saturday meant taking advantage of CMJ’s best perk: free daytime parties. The same bands that play the official evening showcases can be found at more intimate settings hosted by various PR companies, blogs, radio promoters, and magazines. The downside is trying to enjoy live music before you, and often the band, have had their morning coffee. At noon I was barely awake but made it to the Annex to see Boston’s the Bon Savants, whose dreamy and multilayered indie pop has a swagger reminiscent of Pulp.

After filling up on eggs and coffee, I headed to Brooklyn for the annual party thrown by radio and PR agency AAM. Held at the spacious Music Hall of Williamsburg, I arrived just in time to see New Zealand’s Ruby Suns perform their eclectic set, which was a mashup of tribal beats, spacey indie pop, and the kitchen sink. The band is only Ryan McPhun and Amee Robinson, but together they sing and pound away at drums, samplers, electric guitars, and keyboards enough for a band three times the size.

I was curious to see the next band, A Place to Bury Strangers, since they’ve been getting a lot of buzz around NYC. I suspect that their blistering loud music might sound better on album, but live it just sounded like a noisy mess.

Monotonix’s reputation for wild live shows also preceded them, but nothing could have prepared me for what followed. The band, which hails from Israel (and, I’m told, has been banned from almost every live venue in Tel Aviv), set up not on the stage, but in the middle of the room. Barely one song into the set, singer Ami Shalev had already dumped a garbage can full of half-empty beer cups over the drummer’s head. He ran thorough the crowd, scaled the railing into the side balcony, dove over audience members, stared deeply into the eyes of a woman on the edge of the room while singing into her face, and ran up the stairs to teeter on the edge of the top balcony.

Meanwhile, the guitarist and drummer kept perfect time, despite the fact that they, too, were making their way around the room, onto the stage, off the stage, pulling the kick drum onto the wall of the sound booth, over the railing into the balcony, back into the middle of the room and so forth. Talk about breaking down the fourth wall! I’d never seen anything like it. And even with all the chaos, they sounded great! Mind = blown.

Nearby at Glasslands, local band the End of the World was wrapping up the party for online magazine Take the Handle. Lead singer Stefan Marolachakis is also the band’s drummer, a rare talent. His enjoyably ragged croon and their shimmery guitars recall the Walkmen.

With the day parties winding up, and the rain coming down, I headed back into Manhattan for the evening showcases. My first stop was back at the Annex to see electronic duo High Places. After seeing the Ruby Suns, it was hard not to draw comparisons. I found myself wishing that there was more live instrumentation in their set, or that singer Mary Pearson’s vocals would break out of the ethereal sound a little more. High Places are doing something interesting, but it’s still one drop away from being truly great.

Over at Mercury Lounge, Baltimore’s Wye Oak played the Merge Records showcase. Another male-female duo, their music relies not on prerecorded samples but rather on drummer Andy Stack’s ability to play drums with his right hand and a keyboard with his left. Wye Oak’s music is fresh and fearless, which may be a result of their youthfulness. However, Jenn Wasner’s vocals and lyrics have a wiseness that defies her age. Besides playing several songs off their album If Children, the band treated us to a couple new songs that had Wasner braving new territories of bluesiness with her voice and guitar work.

My last stop of the festival was at the Bowery Ballroom to see NYC’s Marnie Stern and the Vivian Girls. Stern, a mostly self-taught singer and guitarist, was a strange and delightful live performer. Her mousey voice followed her riffing on the guitar, cartoonish but powerful. She broke into finger-tapping shredding while shouting encouraging lyrics in manic repeat.

Opinions of the Vivian Girls have been polarized among my friends, and one warned that I might have appreciated them better at a cramped basement party versus the Bowery Ballroom. One thing I will say about the Bowery, though, is it has a kick-ass sound system. With that in mind, there is no accounting for how messy the Vivian Girls sounded. Their brand of garage rock is supposed to sound distorted and full of reverb, but I could barely distinguish the words or the melodies. They plowed through their songs leaving little room to breathe and no dynamics to help the songs take shape. Despite my naysaying, the trio was having a great time, as were plenty of people pressed close to the stage.

It’s true that this year’s CMJ was somewhat devoid of the big headliners usually brought to the lineup. One could argue, however, that CMJ 2008 was more true to the original intent of the festival when it started in 1980: to bring underground bands together in a place where industry professionals can discover breaking artists from the college radio world. Without the distraction of trying to see big-name headliners, the festivalgoers and industry folks were freed up to check out newer, smaller voices breaking into our musical consciousness.

In addition, despite remarking earlier this week how the music biz is still, for the most part, a boy’s club, I will say that with little effort to seek them out I managed to see several bands a night with talented awesome women singing, strumming, and drumming their hearts out.