This review runs live and in color on the Bowery Presents' House List blog.
Friday night of CMJ, with everyone a little worse for wear, found Mercury Lounge as the home to the Windish Agency showcase, although it may as well have been an echo chamber. The reverberated Gauntlet Hair took the stage in the 9 o’clock slot. The latest of the blog-to-label bands, they parlayed a snapping first single, “I Was Thinking”
into an album featuring their trademark high-fret guitar-board strums
and slamming drums and bass. Looking a bit like kids who might have run
around in a fixed-gear bicycle gang at your liberal arts college, the
band played material from their self-titled debut LP, including stunners “Keep Time” and “Top Bunk,”
like Dirty Projectors cuts that got dropped to the bottom of a backyard
swimming pool, all glittering guitars and troubling echoes.
Up next the surprisingly charming Teen
(good luck searching for them on the Internet), an all-female
five-piece, claimed to be three-fifths sisters and 100 percent Canadian.
Now playing in and around Brooklyn, the band was dressed to kill,
eliciting drunken commentary from some grungy looking guys in the middle
of the crowd, which the quintet handled and dismissed with the deftness
of a stand-up comedian. Playing a tight set of dream pop, the band felt
like one part Stars, one part Wilson Phillips and one part School of
Seven Bells. Seeming to build converts with each passing song (the
yelling dudes were now loudly proclaiming their love for the lead singer
or maybe the bassist or perhaps both), the ladies in their evening wear
proved to be the type of pleasant surprise that CMJ still provides.
We Barbarians,
with a considerably smaller sound check and a considerably larger
sound, took the stage at 11 as the most energetic three-piece of the
festival. Trafficking in the kind of sound that might have kept We Are
Scientists from getting kicked off Virgin/EMI, We Barbarians opened with
the shimmering “Headspace,”
full of banging drums and soaring guitars. Lead singer Dave Quon is a
force of nature, even on the allegedly more thoughtful tracks of the
band’s most recent EP, Headspace.
A drummer sweating through his beard and a singer sweating through his
shirt aren’t new semiotics in rock music, but there is something in We
Barbarians that feels singular, loud and important. The bands would move
on, perhaps to the rest of their tours or to even later showcases, and
the echoes of the second-to-last evening of another CMJ would ring out
without the help of a delay pedal.
Listen :: Gauntlet Hair - "Keep Time"
Listen :: Gauntlet Hair - "Top Bunk"
Listen :: We Barbarians
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