If Charlottesville’s indie rock fans found themselves hungry last week, it may be because many bands traveled to New York last week for the CMJ Music Marathon. The festival was now in its 30th year, and blogs painted this as a time of transition for the festival, long a rite of passage for up-and-coming rock bands.
One of the big figures flying around this weekend was $495, which is how much it cost for an all-access pass to the festival. It seemed ridiculous, given that few bands are making serious money these days, and that many bands chose to augment their official CMJ schedule with free or cheap shows, sponsored by blogs and websites.
Todd P., the New York promoter who challenged last year’s South by Southwest Festival with an event in Mexico, capitalized on the CMJ overflow with a bunch of great shows, as did the online magazine Impose. The Village Voice called Pitchfork’s #Offline festival a particular threat to CMJ for offering, at $10 in a single venue, some seriously hyped groups. Friggin’ Kanye even made a cameo there.
My band played four shows in three days and tried to take in as much as possible. With sleep, clean water and toilets at a premium, I didn’t catch the insane amount of music I’d have liked to. But I did catch a few great bands:
Marnie Stern
At Pitchfork’s #Offline festival, Marnie Stern played selections from her new self-titled album, another batch of virtuousic hammer-ons underpinned by honest-to-goodness pop music melodies. In concert, the 34-year-old Stern leaves most of the shredding to prerecorded loops, but her band can’t fake it. Blur your eyes for the most exciting show you’ve never seen.
Street Chant
Though most bands go to CMJ to get noticed, most don’t. It seems that might have been the case with an awesome Auckland three-piece called Street Chant, perhaps the best band that I saw all weekend. Or at least, with a breath of jagged post-punk provided brief, late-night respite from the reverb-soaked I-IV-V’ers that ran CMJ ragged.
Family Trees
This is one of those bands I was ragging on in the above writeup. But there is a fine line between music that is simple and unsophisticated, and Family Trees falls in the latter camp, jazzing up the Garage Rock 101 sonic pallette with wistful major 7ths and soaring, if sometimes out of tune, falsetto vocals.
Jonny Corndawg
Jonny Corndawg is an Esmont native who plays in Charlottesville all the time (his website says he’s in Nashville) and who I caught for the first time over the weekend. His square jaw was beard-covered and framed in a cowboy hat and huge sunglasses. The silly facade—"Jonny Corndawg" is inlayed on his acoustic guitar!—can only hide his chops for so long. If he didn’t have chops, would he have written these lines:
"Drink water and juice with a little slice of lemon/ eat a raw clove of garlic every once in a while/ meditate, appreciate, learn a foreign language/ and understand that immigrants have the hardest lives."
Cloud Nothings
One of the major buzz-beneficiaries from this year’s marathon was Cloud Nothings, had its first record released on CD by Baltimore’s Carpark Records. (Not to be outdone, Lynchburg’s Speakertree Records put it out first and quickly sold out of its first pressing.) Look for more from these youngsters in the near future. Check them out here.
Did I miss any good music in Charlottesville this weekend?
