Afterwards I walked to Webster Hall in order to see New Orleans punk band Donovan Wolfington in its adjacent Studio. Neil Berthier and Matthew Seferian played a granular and occasionally obscure form of pop-punk that was also melodically and personally accessible; they looked as if they were playing for a group of their friends. (Berthier later clarified, they were; several friends from the band’s past were in attendance).
When I took the train into Brooklyn to see Liverpool trio Stealing Sheep at Knitting Factory, I made a pleasant discovery which seems unique to the atmosphere of CMJ: every band I wanted to see was playing in the same place. Stealing Sheep themselves were delightfully oblique; their songs refused to resolve, built out of gleaming, phosphorescent synth tones and delayed blurs of guitar, and they walked onstage in leotards and sunglasses, appearing as alien as their music.
The Album Leaf, a collective formed in the late 90s around musician Jimmy Lavalle, played afterward, and the Knitting Factory seemed filled to near-capacity for the first time I can remember. They traded mostly in gentle, electronic textures, occasionally grazed by the curve of a violin or a weightless voice. The bands I had seen that day were either willfully loud or shattered and digressive enough in structure to require constant focus, so this kind of modest glacial drift was both welcome and extremely pleasant in experience.
Half of the Knitting Factory emptied out before Eternal Summers, which was a shame; their starry, restlessly shimmering guitar pop reawakened the space atomically. Singer and guitarist Nicole Yun sang in phrases both gentle and forceful, a quality shared by the music, a warming sun. The final band to play the Knitting Factory on Saturday, Diet Cig, went on at 1.30am. Guitarist Alex Luciano encouraged everyone in the audience to stretch and awake, and the simple yet emotionally exposed guitar pop she makes with drummer Noah Bowman pulled the crowd into an entirely new velocity; it suddenly felt like one in the afternoon. “This stage is so big,” Luciano remarked before leaping across it in stunning arcs.
Her energy transferred to everyone else, and the entire space became animated. I saw them do this again the next night; even though CMJ was technically over, an unofficial showcase was held at Palisades by Father/Daughter Records and Miscreant, the theme of which was “homecoming”. Just before their set the soundman played Shake It Off, which everyone, including Luciano, danced to almost symphonically. When they played, Luciano performed the same elastic moves in an inelastic, flowing gown; behind her homecoming decorations fell in glittering tendrils. It was an appropriate, atomically charged ending to a CMJ that almost organically acquired dynamic force.
