|
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.
|
