CMJ 2012: Detour Scotland's Ally McCrae surveys the New York Music Marathon
Greetings from the midst of New York’s yearly marathon of new music, (cue American broadcaster voice) Ally McCrae reporting from CMJ 2012. This festival is nuts, not your traditional festival in a field, it’s more a case of around 1,300 acts playing over the 4 days in venues allllll over this brilliant town (it means a lot of gig-hopping and getting to see a bit of the city into the bargain), problem is… trying to see everything, here’s my top 5 highlights for the discerning Skinny reading, new music lover.
First act I caught was for me, a bit of a big deal – Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie) playing in a tiny wee dive-bar that he used to frequent 12 years ago before he got all famous and stuff. After over-coming the problem of not being on the guestlist with a some blatant flaunting of the Scottish accent, I was treated to an hour and a half set of tracks from his new solo record, some Postal Service joints, a couple of Death Cab favourites, including, aptly, set-closer Marching Bands of Manhattan, called for by most of the 100 people in the room, made all the more special by Ben fumbling his way through the song with laughter and repeated mentions that he’d not played it in years.
So that was cool, but not exactly new, so headed up the road to check out The Orwells – bit of a buzz band for the first day of the festival, Chicago teenagers make some devastatingly catchy punk tracks, with that total slacker-pop sound nailed. Their lead singer Mario was something else, moshing all over the place with real snotty arrogance that the crowds over here seem to lap up – talking to him afterwards, it definitely ain’t just an act, then finding out they’ve already had a run in with the law, these kids are living it with some real, refreshing hooks and choruses.
Caught London 3-piece Daughter playing a show live on KEXP (Seattle music radio station) in the CMJ Union, it was pretty packed and cool to see the USA seemingly falling in love with their haunting, ethereal, vocals and mesmerising beats. They are doing a ton of shows throughout the festival and are seemingly a bit shocked about the love shown to them here, in a bashful, lovely, very British way. Good on them!
The first few days of this festival has a ton of panels on all manner of industry discussion points, I tend to steer clear of these because, well I’d rather be at a show. That said I did hit up one yesterday… Young Guru (Jay Z’s producer) in conversation with MTV’s Sway, totally inspirational chat from the big man for young producers and rappers and interestingly when quizzed on what he thought would be the next big thing in Hip Hop he said – International –
Huge shout out to the brilliance of The Jezabels from
Gig I went to on merit of name alone of the day: PicturePlane. A wee afternoon jaunt on account of the name alone was a complete let down. One man dressed as a 14 year old goth playing fairly out of time chiptune. In a word, pie.