CMJ: No, we're not finished with you yet

[One of the dudes in Cock ESP, prior to his performance at the E4E1 noise show. This has nothing to do with the rest of this post. Photo by Nate Dorr.]

If Kim Jong Il ran an indie music festival, it would probably look a lot like CMJ. The event is basically a five day death-march with a rock soundtrack: Bands play punishing schedules that force them to schlep from Don Hill's or Banjo Jim's or some other place this correspondent has never once thought about actually going to (although apparently the latter has free bluegrass shows on the weekends. Sick.) to the Bell House or the Knitting Factory Old Office or a label party at some similarly inconvenient corner of the earth.

For a musician, this thing must seem like the musical version of Kafka's the Trial: you go before one nervy, exhausted-looking, judgmental group of total strangers for about 20 minutes, pack up your shit, drive for an hour, and then go before another group of nervy, exhausted-looking and judgmental group of strangers.  To make matters worse, the strangers could have a major impact on the rest of your artistic career—while I was killing time at Cakeshop on Thursday afternoon, I had no idea that one of the other five people in the house was Marc Hogan. I was already too fried to give a crap about whoever it was onstage, but Hogan seems to have liked them, thus underscoring the incredibly random nature of CMJ crowds. Another anecdote, along similar lines: this is the second year in a row that I've run into the Times' John Pareles at a CMJ show. Each time he's been alone, blowing through page after page of his notebook with a sobriety almost unheard of among festival attendees. This year I saw him at the Terrorbird day show with Marnie Stern, Women and Tobacco; last year I ran into him at Foals' first-ever show in the United States. So the man must have taste, right?

So my favorites of the festival were:

Crocodiles

As far as I'm concerned, the Crocs ruled Todd P's 30-hour, four-day long festival at the Williamsburg Bridge (and later Monster Island). Basically little more than a guy ripping into a guitar with backing tracks, the duo went from glam to shoegaze and back to glam without sacrificing a shred of coherency along the way. The guitar-vocal-backing track thing could have looked and sounded ridiculous, but their chops were so good that you hardly noticed the casio beats keeping time. It isn't so crazy that this band's recorded output consists of nothing but a single 7-inch. What's crazy is that they don't even have a MySpace page. And if they don't have a MySpace page, how can I be sure that they actually exist? Or that I actually saw them? Weird.

Kirsten Ketsjer

The Danish trio played an almost-empty East Village Radio day show on Friday, although the venue (an arts space on Front Street in South Street Seaport. Ewww.) filled temporarily for the band's set. They sound a bit like what Talk Talk would have sounded like if Talk Talk had decided to write 3-minute pop songs: the guitars are simultaneously wandering and tight, while the sound straddles post-rock and avant-jazz. The group's only album is self-released, but that'll change assuming any A&R hack with any taste whatsoever caught the drums-trumpet-soprano sax jam they close their sets with.

Rob Walmart

Finally a band that can live up to its gimmick: Walmart consists of five or six dudes concocting devastating beats from the back of a converted ice cream truck, and they're at their best when one of said dudes goes on stream-of-consciousness tangents with ambient synth lines plugging away in the background. The day after CMJ ended, I noticed only eight plays that day on their MySpace page—at least four of them from me playing that Ric Flair song over and over again.

Finn Riggins

Complex, artsy, danceable stuff. See my earlier raving.

The Coathangers

So remind me why everyone wasn't going apeshit over a confrontational, attractive agro-punk girl group? Isn't this the kind of thing that music writers wet themselves over?

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

: God I hope the album they're putting out this April launches them to astronomical stardom, or at least to something other than relatively obscurity. Their noisy art-pop is better than just about anyone else's; in concert it thrives on the arresting interplay between Cocteau Twins delicateness and punishing noise. Maybe the best set of the festival.

Late of the Pier

I didn't actually see these guys, but I did randomly pick up a promo disc of theirs at a day show. Come to find out, the British buzz band makes radio-friendly acid-techno that I can't fucking turn off. "Focker" is one of the best singles of the year; their first US show was at CMJ set last week, so I'm sure they're on their way to success, exposure, Bowery shows etc. in their near-future…