CMJ Music Marathon

CMJ Music Marathon 2010
New York City, USA
19, 20, 21, 22 & 23/10/2010

CMJ is the College Music Journal, an American organ that specialises in cataloguing the exploits of bubbling indie bands, rather like The Fly. Its annual Music Marathon blow-out sees dozens of showcase gigs by (in US parlance) “hot” bands you’ve mostly never heard of (though some you might have). The gigs take place at all the key music venues around New York’s Lower East Side and in Brooklyn.

Names for early adopters to drop? Dom might be one. The Massachusetts foursome are fiercely fashion-conscious, and channel the spirit of Thin Lizzy into the kind of catchy songs that Strokes fans could learn to love. Minks are a Brooklyn boy-girl duo augmented on stage by a handful of supplementary musicians, making their sound coalesce into something approaching Arcade Fire. Diamond Rings meanwhile delivers single-handed electro-pop from the same shovel that Ali Love has used before. Denver’s Snake Rattle Rattle Snake proffer lo-fi with a slick of surfer rhythms.

A couple of rungs up the ladder we find two fine performances from fast-rising indie darlings. The Drums are new to US audiences. Like The Killers before them they were “broken in Britain”, as the record industry saying goes. But there’s an excitement about them here and they deliver a suckerpunch secret show at Santos Party House. Marnie Stern is even more of a delight at the same venue – her noodling guitar work really comes alive on stage. Snowden had a brief flirt with fame with a wonderful and under-appreciated album for Jade Tree Records in 2006, and they return with a crackling set of indie-rock songs that sees them reinvigorated and poised for another throw of the dice.

Team GB is in evidence in NYC too. This is a rare chance for UK bands to crack the States, and Chapel Club give their shoegazing all to pleasing effect. Blood Red Shoes – who only show up at the last minute due to a rumoured murder putting the kybosh on a previous engagement – also power through in front of an interested but reserved crowd (the default setting round these parts). Unfortunately the British party is only let down by the ever-awful Johnny Flynn. And while it wasn’t quite The Beatles at Shea Stadium, there were a couple of screaming girls at the front when Everything Everything proved why they’re the pick of the British bunch at their first ever New York gig at Williamsburg’s Music Hall. The crowd really seemed to warm to the prodigious Mancunians. Perhaps EE are a British import the Americans will accept wholeheartedly?

Some say that CMJ has lost its lustre in recent years and certainly SXSW in Austin is now the key place to talent-spot for the future. But CMJ is still an enviable sonic smorgasbord which rewards the open minded. The age-old problem of how to kill the days at a festival is also less of a problem when Manhattan is your oyster – and that’s why spending a week seeing bands here is so enormously enjoyable. Or, as the front page of the popular New York tabloid Metro rather more succinctly put it on the festival’s final day: “CMJ? OMG!” Quite.