When the band turns up the volume, they shake and when they lower the volume the volume they shudder. The prettiness and intensity of Tommy’s voice makes up with Johnny’s look of aggrieved hostility and moodiness on stage and second guitarist Matt Mason who sings back up so well you think he could front the band
around the 14th band I’ve seen in a four day period and the third guitar rock band starring 20 something boys in three hours, it is beginning to all sound the same. If you add to that the less then brilliant acoustics at Pianos and your ears turn to jelly. On record the songs signify, at Pianos they seem to lack distinction.
The sound is dreamy but sturdy, real songs which sometimes dive into jams with the piano leading. It is glorious without being enervating, and though Peter showed more energy dancing around before the show, it is the mood and the music that is taking you elsewhere
CMJ Music Marathon week in New York, so I saw 14 shows and oddly enough nearly all of them were pretty good, it really was a blast and next year I think I’ll take the five days off work. Till then, Public Access TV are the next in line for the Strokes (or do I mean the Virgins) crown
On the epic case builder “Metropolis” he sings “I don’t want to live till I’m forty, I wanna be young and dead.” That’s big time songwriting right there -that’s what we want.
Why not make it 75 minutes and throw in some hits? Especially when you are pushing an iffy album which hasn’t helped you even sell out a 1500 SRO? Why not give people what they want to hear? You wrote the suckers, sing em.
What we got was fine, and any set that has Liza Colby singing her bluesy heart out and constantly rocking songs all with her shirt half undone certainly can’t be all bad. But it wasn’t what the Liza Colby Sound are capable of.
On stage at Cake Shop yesterday, Be Forest are quietly intense building up walls of strings and a terrific heavy handed drum while playing songs off their current release Earth Beat
This isn’t faint praise, it is feint praise, it is like whining that your gal Giselle Bunchen doesn’t have bigger boobs… This was a good set with a band stretching, and that’s fine, I just hope they snap back the better for it.
She’s won a ton of awards in New Zealand, opened for Lorde and cat Power, and isn’t precious at all. Yeah and on stage she seems both artistically extreme and musically valid at the same time. Very approachable? So approach her.
Their name suggests indie dream pop and their home , Hollywood Florida, suggests surf and turf, but their sounds is New Yawk girl group via the Ramones with a huge dollop of feedback, reverb and a misheard chorus via My Bloody Valentine. In other words, they are awesome and a great way to kick off CMJ 2014
given the circumstances, what interests me is time and place rather than specific bands. You catch enough, you’ll stumble onto pay dirt and any way, I wanna cover cover as much as I can as fast as I can. So I’ve been analyzing the schedule of concerts and I now have a headache
The trick with CMJ is to scout out the smaller gigs and to spend all day saturday on Ludlow Street. Having said that, I am a long time fan of Lily & The Parlour Tricks, just heard Lia Ices new album for the first time, loved Ratking at Governors Ball earlier this year and Ry x provided “Berlin” to Sam Smith.
You know why time flies when you run a music website? Because you are always planning three months in advance and so, already, it is time to thank about CMJ’s
