The last part of my CMJ adventure was the Sub Pop showcase at the Bowery Ballroom on November 2nd, which promised to be a long and sometimes-exciting evening. The main attraction of the evening was The Shins, who Sub Pop decided to put on at one in the bloody morning (because they could) and the line-up before then was meant to be a star-studded list of Sub Pop’s biggest indie darlings: Loney, Dear, Oxford Collapse, The Elected, CSS, The Thermals, The Album Leaf, and The Shins. The doors opened at 6 PM, the night ended around 3 AM, and I woke up the next day with the plague! This might lead you to ask, was it worth it?

The answer: kinda. Sarah and I skipped Loney, Dear to go eat a delicious dinner in Little Italy, since Oxford Collapse were the first band we wanted to see and they didn’t go on until 8. Sarah pondered while eating her manicotti, “What if Loney, Dear ends up being the best new band of our generation and we’re missing it?” “Somehow, I doubt it,” I replied. So I have no idea how they were. I hear they were good. We did make it in time for Oxford Collapse, a band that hails from Brooklyn, New York, even though the lead singer looked a little Upstate New York, with his beard and plaid shirt. They were decent, a solid indie rock act that reminded me of the type of music I listened to in college. Pitchfork agrees with me there; they called OC “basically an early-90s emo band.” Sarah thought the bassist had “crazy eyes,” and it appeared to me that he’d just done a lot of homework when it came to watching other dudes in bands. He was all about the dramatic moves and poses and, well, crazy eyeball stuff. We were too far back to get any good photos of them, but we moved further up once they were done.

Then it was time for The Elected, who went through a pleasant set of dreamy indie pop. Their lead singer, Rilo Kiley’s Blake Sennett, was a tiny, long-haired machine, and over the course of their time on stage, Sarah and I compared him from everyone to Beck to (white) Prince to someone’s grandma to Elliott Smith to Sam Kinison. The last reference was mentioned when Sennett grabbed the mic and started shouting into it like a madman. It brought back memories of that Carson performance Kinison did. One lovely number was sung by Nate Greely, who Sennett called an “angel” because of his fair-colored hair. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Bloom entranced us with his weirdly fluorescent eyes.

I know I promised to write at length about The Knife at Webster Hall, but every other blog in existence has already done it and I probably don’t remember the details anymore. Please forgive the delay; I’ve had the plague since the end of CMJ, but I’ll do the best that I can. Here are some highlights from the evening: long lines, talking heads, ski masks, lasers, brown creatures running with pencils, awkward yet exuberant Swedish dancing. And that ain’t all.

After the BrooklynVegan show at Pianos, I walked down to the village, had a lovely dinner and then made my way to Webster Hall, five minutes before doors were meant to open for the early show of the night (the original show had been scheduled at 8 PM, and when it sold out quickly, they bumped that show to 6 PM, and added another show later that night, with doors at 10:15 PM). I had hoped I’d get in easily, but instead I had to wait in a line that stretched around the block and didn’t get into the venue until 6:35. I made my way to the balcony, exhausted from my earlier show, and whittled away the excruciating hour-long wait for The Knife to go on at 7:30, while a lackluster DJ played, whose name I can’t remember.

I will say that it was the most packed I’ve seen Webster Hall ever (except for maybe Sleater-Kinney’s final NYC performance there this past August) and everyone is right when they say that The Knife’s live show is an audiovisual experience that’s not to be missed. I made the mistake of standing in the balcony, close to the stage, instead of securing a spot behind the technicians. I couldn’t see the visual aspects of the show as well as people who were looking at the stage head-on. But I did get to see Olof and Karin dancing between their screens on stage, getting down to their own brand of dark, goth electropop that had the entire venue mesmerized. They were dressed all in black, with ski masks on to completely obscure their identities. Aside from Karin’s placement by the microphone, it was hard to tell who was the woman and who was the man. It was a nice complement to her vocals, which drift between masculine and feminine, making it unclear just who is delivering them. Many couldn’t believe that her vocals were live, but they were. What wasn’t live (as far as I could tell from being so close) was Olof’s percussion; he was banging on a drumpad of sorts, but did so even when there were no accompanying beats. Other times, his strikes were out of time with the music, and soon it was evident he was merely having a grand ol’ time.