[ed. note – I like the music, just not the overuse of the term. ‘k thx.]
Day one of CMJ started off with some buzzy indie rock and ended with some lighter folk fare. With nothing but a few tacos in between, it all added up to a slow start to what many are already considering a lighter CMJ week than usual. After catching up with friends on Ludlow Street (the unofficial center of the post-Fader Lounge CMJ world) it was time to catch Holiday Shores and Small Black at Cake Shop during Pop Tarts Suck Toasted Day Party.
Holiday Shores played a few songs that I thought were great, but there were also many which didn’t grab my attention. They certainly do have great energy and I hope they develop more songs like those that ended the set, which had creative melodies and interesting harmonic progressions. I don’t mean to single them out here, but I am really over the whole shout-a-couple-words-in-unison thing. Unless you’re the Beastie Boys, don’t be afraid to spilt up and sing some harmonies once in a while.
The praise surrounding Small Black’s music is deserved. They combine electronics (drum machine, keyboards, sampler) and more traditional elements (live drums, bass guitar, vocals) to create a lush soundscape which is packed with musical ideas and propulsive, but not overbearing. Having been a fan of lead-singer Josh’s previous band Slowlands, it was nice to hear his ideas executed using a new sound. His voice – treated with copious amounts of delay and reverb – is subservient to the dense musical landscape that envelopes it. Although, for this reason, I do think the vocals translate better on record then they do live. When there’s a human in front of you, standing downstage-center, opening his mouth and emitting noise, you can’t help but focus the bulk of your attention there. Worth special mention is Small Black’s bassist, who had great stage presence and sound. As soon as I started to think he was being made redundant by the synths and drum machine, he would stop playing bass to bang out some percussion parts and it became obvious how much he contributed to the low end of their sound. More bass players need to stop playing during a song just so that people can miss them while they’re gone.
The evening turned out to be a laid-back affair at The Living Room with two bands who defy grammatical convention – papercranes and KaiserCartel. This version of papercranes was quite different than the one who played an electric set at last year’s After The Jump Fest. Here, they were stripped down to acoustic guitar, bass, piano and a snare drum which allowed the vocals, all four of them, to take center stage. Highlights of the set included a cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen” and the beautiful wordless chorus of “Synapses” which you can hear on their myspace page.
Courtney Kaiser and Benjamin Cartel are fantastic musicians with strong, confident voices and precise musicianship who execute their relatively simple and catchy songs with ease. If you have heard their most popular song “Oh, No” (video here) then you would know what to expect from their songwriting, but their performance exceeded my expectations. Few artists connect with the audience as well as they do. Courtney tried her best to sing a bit of their final song to each and every audience member as they performed while wandering through the crowd, but that level of intimacy was achieved during the entire set. Dressed in red and black it was hard to keep from thinking of them as the folk version of the White Stripes and I wouldn’t be surprised if their career begins to approach such popularity in the coming year.
The only thing that bothered me about KaiserCartel was that they were described in their CMJ blurb as a “Minimal, lo-fi indie folk duo creating wistfully pleasant music”. The Lo-Fi term certainly seems to have been overused and abused in the past year. As I have come to understand it, elements of Lo-Fi include vocals that sound like they were recorded using microphones that have been dropped a few hundred times (or purchased at radio shack), amplifiers with vacuum tubes just barely clinging to life, digital bit crushing, tape noise, reduced intelligibility of lyrics, etc. KaiserCartel’s music may be simplistic, but it is polished, shiny and very much high fidelity as far as I’m concerned. There are some great current bands who I certainly would consider low fidelity such as The Beets and Times New Viking, but alas, Lo-Fi is losing its edge as it’s reduced to the newest buzz word.
The more bands I see this week, the less I’ll probably write about them, so enjoy this update.
