My first day at CMJ started inauspiciously enough, at the beginning of a lightly attended showcase at Black Bear in Williamsburg, which New York band New Myths were opening. The trio project a sound bigger than their constituent parts: a cavernous and muscular new wave through which the combined voices of Broas, drummer Rosie Slater and bassist Marina Ross weave and pulse.
After their set I migrated to Palisades in Brooklyn in order to see Kero Kero Bonito. Unfortunately, I had read the set times incorrectly. I thought they would play at 8, but the showcase itself started at 8:30, with Kero Kero Bonito appearing at 11. A line wrapped around the corner. I managed to see the opener, Love Spread, a duo consisting of Ryota Machida and Narumi Iyama, whose sound sits somewhere between the gridlocked melodic designs of J-Pop and the hypersyllabic assault of gabber. It was thrilling and overwhelming, and they covered Beck’s Loser, recalibrating it to a major key where its changes seemed even more perverse.
I took the train back to Manhattan in order to catch Sharkmuffin’s set at (Le) Poisson Rouge. On record, Sharkmuffin’s impact is dry and immediate, ideal atmospheric conditions for heavy garage rock; on Tuesday night their songs seemed smoky, elastic and multi-dimensional, guitars curving spectrally out of a muscular darkness that issued from the bass guitar and drums. “This song is about a bad Tinder date,” said guitarist and singer Tarra Thiessen. “If you’re on a bad Tinder date right now, you should dance.” Almost no one danced, though some unconsciously swayed.
The final set I saw Tuesday night was Nina Sky at Arlene’s Grocery. I briefly caught the duo that performed before them, Denitia & Sene, who played a gorgeous and oblique form of R&B which moved more according to instinct than the designs of pop; hooks would be lingered on indefinitely over an evolving electronic pulse. Nina Sky themselves fit strangely into the venue, which has a capacity for about 50 people. They had sound issues throughout their set; microphones kept sputtering in and out of life, strange distortions appeared from nowhere, but the crowd moved densely to their music, which condenses R&B, dance music and synth pop into one elegant gesture, and over which twins Nicole and Natalie Albino harmonize in overlapping, ribbony phrases. They retrofitted their 2004 hit Move Ya Body over a more austere 808 pattern, which, like the show itself, was both sort of awkward yet fully inhabited.
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Day two started with Worriers, who were headlining the free Breakthru Radio showcase at Cake Shop. The band play a crisp and emotionally complicated form of pop-punk, which helped break up the dense atmosphere of Cake Shop’s downstairs stage. Worriers’ songs tend to describe interstitial spaces, situations that have an inherent tension no matter the surface calm and composition of singer and guitarist Lauren Denitzio’s voice. “This is a song about how I don’t understand the gender binary or why we need it,” Denitzio said before playing They/Them/Theirs, which lives between the polarity of “him” and “her” and undermines the substance of both. “What if I’m not a part of the see and be seen?” Denitzio sings. “Neither nor, both and me, in between, in between.”
I then took the train into Brooklyn to see the Collect Records/Brooklyn Vegan showcase at Baby’s All Right. The venue had scheduled a strange, free party for a water bottle company just before the showcase, so Foxes in Fiction didn’t play until 8.30, an hour after they were supposed to start. A machine stage-left issued dense blooms of smoke, through which Foxes in Fiction, a Canadian/New York duo, layered vast, creaturely blurs of guitar, applying just enough reverb to imply endlessness without becoming exhausting. Their music is meditative; it invites the audience into a dreamy, introspective and somewhat seductive space. I imagine it sounds aggressive and threatening when you’re sick. When Warren Hildebrand started easing noise out of his guitar, the crystal shells that make up the backdrop of Baby’s All Right’s stage started to pulse and seizure in bright patterns guided by the music. It was the first time the backdrop had ever made sense to me.
Finally, for my last two sets of the night, I walked to Brooklyn Bowl to see Blonde Redhead and Failure. Blonde Redhead, who’ve been playing together since 1993, are an incredibly efficient band, all of their songs locked into tight grooves which evolve modestly yet materially, like a spiral staircase. It settled the crowd into a composed yet tense mood for Failure, a 90s alt-rock band who reformed last year, and who, despite containing only four members (including recently added guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age), produce an enormous sound, guitars, bass and drums combining into a dense electric current. They arranged their set by album, playing more than half of this year’s The Heart Is a Monster (which is one of the best rock records of the year) before settling into material from their 1996 opus Fantastic Planet. They closed with Daylight from that record, the heaving construction of which has a oceanic effect, the guitars gathering together in enormous, overwhelming waves.
