Thursday night’s lineup was perhaps the softest of the CMJ schedule so far, and for fifteen minutes before logic set in, it seemed like going to shows might give you the Ebola virus. So, don’t ask me to explain why I started night 3 at a Gerard Way concert. Those were different times. 

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Let no one suggest that Gerard Way is not loved. The My Chemical Romance frontman, recently gone solo, inspired major pandemonium among a-not-quite-full Webster Hall crowd. The room would erupt in squeals every time the house music paused before he’d taken the stage. Any sign that he might soon appear was treated as if he had. When the lights went down and he finally did trot out, it was all too much to bear. The Webster floor was instantly elastic but the metal barricade at the front fared far worse. After two and a half songs, the crush of affection buckled it entirely, forcing an extended break while the venue crew unbolted it from the floor and dragged it through the exits like plane crash debris. 

I dunno, man, that seems like a pretty strong piece of metal to have been taken down entirely by overexcited teens! In the time gap, fans were lifted from the crowd by stage crew, completely overwhelmed with emotion. A sobbing girl was carried out next to me, unable to walk out under her own power. Shit got intense!

For reasons that are primarily demographic, I’m honestly not that familiar with My Chemical Romance’s records. Nothing I saw at this show made me fall in love nor recoil with disgust. I get that Way’s moved past his genre-defining emo pop at this point, but he certainly seems like a guy with decent taste. The sleazy guitar sounds his band summoned for his entrance had an oily Bowie in Berlin air. The pop-punk numbers were short and punchy, the earnest ballads appropriately hammy and grandiose. His band delivered big, chunky Britpop chords all night.

An actual Sleater-Kinney cover came later in the set:  

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Still, Way was a little overeager. He aimed towards sophisticated pop, but bounded around the stage like a golden retriever who just heard the garage door go up. His voice was competent but not particularly transporting. There was too little glam in his glam. 

But what’s he going to do? Act aloof in front of a devoted crowd who are so excited to see him they can barely stand? Ignore the handmade artwork the front row continually thrust into his hands? He treats his fans with warmth and respect, to his great credit. And it is hard to completely dismiss a guy who inspires that kind of full-body devotion. 

Ballet School were best at full blast. The Berlin-based trio featured a black-cloaked and be-hatted alt-rock guitarist, a drummer who approximating the sound of big, gated studio pop drums live (while wearing his own band’s t-shirt), and ultra excitable Irish singer Rosie Blair. When a song focused too much on any one of those elements the band sounded okay, but it worked far better when all three let loose at the same time. Beaming every part of their music forth at full-watt holds the risk of a textural mess, but their best weapon might counterintuitively be an allergy to negative space.  

Early in Tei Shi‘s set she produced an athletic cover of Beyoncé’s “No Angel.” It seemed like a no-win proposition for an artist making modern R&B herself. Either you live up to the vocal power, only to arrive at the original destination, or you fall far short. But the Colombian singer, now a Brooklynite, sang it with strength and feeling, her band adding just enough synth bubbles to differentiate the song without redefining it. As proof of raw talent, it was effective if slightly inert. It was a bar that she cleared.

More interesting than the Twigs-y slow jams among her original songs were the fleeting moments that drew from a wider pool of sounds. The drummer and guitarist accompanying her offered big beats or discordant noise in a few key moments that gave the nimble kick of her voice something imperfect to contrast against. For all the talk of R & B’s crossover into modern indie-rock, there are still sounds and genres that have remained entirely segregated. Moving past tasteful danceability and slick bleep-bloopery with snippets of raw abrasion could be an interesting direction if she cares to push it. 

Kate Bush comparisons for eccentric female pop singers have become the new My Bloody Valentine comps for loud guitar bands, a lazy shorthand that can makes a new artist seem extra disappointing when they fall short. So I hesitate to evoke KB in praising Canadian songwriter Lydia Ainsworth, though she lives up to it far more than most. Mentioning Ainsworth as a peer to a more modern singer like Julia Holter definitely seems all wrong. The groovy high-drama of her live set barely resembles the gentle playfulness of Holter’s stuff. I’d read going in that Ainsworth had a tendency for interpretive performance choices, hiring live dancers or bringing a live-but-hard-to-startle snake onstage. She doesn’t need props to be compelling, clearly. 

Searching for a new favorite dinner (or brunch) spot for the fall? Look no further than Fat Goose, a seasonal American restaurant with a focus on fresh, local ingredients.



Fat Goose serves up humble dishes prepared with refined culinary techniques and—above all—a commitment to good food! Thoughtful and affordable cocktails, wines, and beers rotate seasonally to complement your meal.



The space is located on a cozy corner in North Williamsburg, and boasts an open dining room complete with big windows (for better people-watching, of course), pressed tin ceilings, and earthy-hued décor—it’s exactly the comfortable, autumnal vibe we’re craving this season.



See for yourself what the fuss is about! Head over to 125 Wythe Ave (at N. 8th Street) and treat yourself to a meal at Fat Goose!



Open for dinner and weekend brunches – Accepts reservations – Closed Mondays

Wednesday was an exceptionally rotten New York weather day, even if your job doesn’t require traveling from rock club to rock club by sneaker. But still, the bands must play on! (I mean they all flew here already…)

Tall tales of Brooklyn sci-fi freaks, British gentlemen, Japanese punk lifers, and magical L.A. teens can be found below. 

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Brooklyn’s Future Punx didn’t really sound like future punks, but since their particular brand of retro hasn’t been heard from in a while, it was fresh all the same. Think late 70s trash-bag New Wave, obsessed with sci-fi paperbacks and at least disco bassline-curious. Or given the generation gap, maybe think of a Tumblr account centered on these interests. The grooves they got up to, laying live drums over a sequencer, were thick and wildly danceable. New single “I’m So Inspired” has a subtle Talking Heads influence, even. This vibe was attempted a lot more in the early to mid-00s, to varying degrees of success. The current version of Future Punx would have slid into the upper middle, at least. (I’d say they’re in range of the Japanese band Polysics, if that meant anything to anyone.) 

Also, they looked absolutely perfect in the shitty closed circuit TV hanging above the Cake Shop bar. 

London band Ultimate Painting were another act executing a familiar sound with better than average results. They played a very British mix of melancholy indie-pop and classic underground rock n’ roll. At times it was gentle, but not snoozy, sort of like a properly caffeinated Clientele. In noisier bits vocalist/guitarist James Hoare was allowed to indulge his Velvet Underground worship even more than he does his great other band Veronica Falls, which is a lot. They were exceedingly tuneful, and mostly very tasteful (despite indulging in some overlong jamming that never quite reached bliss). Bands like this never really go out of style, and almost never break through beyond a small, dedicated cult following. You could forget about them for a decade, but then be delighted by their inclusion in a NYC Popfest 2024 lineup. The definition of a pretty solid band. 

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In terms of energy, enthusiasm, and pure fun, they just couldn’t compete with Osaka, Japan, veterans Shonen Knife. Formed in the early 80s, and championed by legendarily tasteful gents like John Peel and Kurt Cobain, their silly Ramones-inspired pop-punk is, if anything, more relevant now that the mid-90s variety of the genre has been newly nostalgized by grown-up Hot Topic babies. The band paid off their Ramones debt early with a crowd-shout along version of “Blitzkrieg Bop.” (If you look close at this video, you can see me Tweeting-reporting through that like a real lame.) Newer songs, written about simple pleasures like ramen noodles or green tea ice cream were done in the style of 70s American hard rock. The head banging pleasures they brought are evidenced above. These songs were ridiculous, sure, but never smug or self-impressed. “Bear Up Bison” still totally slays.

Shonen Knife might be an intrinsically silly group, but there was a level of joy here that young bands in town looking to make their mark would do well to aspire towards.

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Having flown too close to the sun, arrogantly assuming its battery might last forever, my phone decided to die right before L.A.’s Girlpool played at Baby’s All Right. Of course the one set I could get no evidence of would be the one set of the night I left thinking I’d seen future stars. Two normal teens playing on a smoke-filled stage, lit with twinkling lights, they looked sort of amazing as well. Picture it in your mind’s eye, perhaps? Or watch the above video from a few months back, the best approximation I could find of their live sound.

Last night, as on the video, it was striking how few elements make up a spare sound that somehow becomes legitimately big. Guitar, bass, simultaneous singing. The combination of those elements just rang out in the room. It wasn’t pretty, exactly, their harmonies do have a quality that’s a bit sour. But it’s warm and even sort of mysterious. By logical intuition, their stuff shouldn’t have this sort of alchemic cumulative effect. And yet…. 

As a bonus, here’s a silly video of the girls dancing at Baby’s after the show. In it, they seem somehow extra Californian. 

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“I always had fantasies of being on stage and playing guitar and singing and kind of rocking out, just like any young kid does. Now that I can play guitar and I get to do that, childhood me is air-punching right now.”  

On “First Love/Late Spring,” the first gorgeous single we heard from Brooklyn songwriter Mitski Miyawaki this year, she describes herself not as an adult, but a “tall child.” So, let the air-punching continue. The rest of her new record, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, out soon on surging indie label Double Double Whammy, is equally strong—sad and funny and tough but tender. Though she’d already released two records of heavily orchestrated, sad jazz vibes, this is her first set of songs since learning the guitar. The fuzzy feedback crunch gives her technically sound voice a new ballast to bounce off. She now makes disheveled basement rock that holds more than a little grace. 

Having just returned home from a west coast tour with neighborhood pals LVL Up, she plays her only CMJ week show tomorrow night at Silent Barn, for Miscreant and Father/Daughter Records Conscious Coupling Party (with other cool bands like Girlpool, Amanda X, and Small Wonder). She’ll be back there on November the 13th to celebrate her album’s release two days before. She deserves to be kind of a big deal by then. 

We caught up with Mitski when she was still on the road, in an attempt to get to know her a bit better first. Our chat touched on her well-travelled childhood and music school background, the combination of sadness and wit in her lyrics, the sad-sackery of Milhouse from The Simpsons, and the horrible possibility that someone might make you wear an old-timey Christmas bonnet. 

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Where are you from?

Originally? I live in Brooklyn.

Did you grow up in New York state?

The thing is, my father works for the State Department. He’s a foreign service officer with the State Department, meaning we moved to a different country every year or so when I was growing up. So the question “Where are you from?” is actually quite complicated for me.

But there must be a place that springs to mind first?

It depends on the day, really. Sometimes I feel very Japanese, so I say I’m from Japan. I lived in Malaysia for 3 years. Sometimes, I just randomly say that if it’s a person I know I’m not going to meet again and I’m feeling playful. Usually, it’s just easier to say that I’m from New York, because at this point New York is the place I’ve lived longest, which is 5 years.

Is this recent tour the first time you’ve seen the rest of the country?

Yeah! It’s really special to me because I haven’t really lived in the U.S. but this is my country I suppose. Going through the landscapes, it almost feels like a pilgrimage. “Oh, this is where I’m from!” The drive over here from Denver, it was like, tear-inducing. It was amazing.

And now that I’m out of New York, I’m staying at people’s houses where they pay like $200 a month for some huge space. Maybe I need to get the eff out of New York.

Ending up at SUNY Purchase to study composition, you must have had some recognition and drive to make music from fairly early on?

I had always been not making music, but learning music. It was only at 19 that I started making my own songs. Until then I had been studying music and I had been loving music, but it never occurred to me that I could make my own music. So I didn’t actually make my own music until my first year of college, actually at Hunter. I was a film and media major and then I just realized that this wasn’t what I wanted to do. I had to buckle down and actually do what I wanted to do, so I started writing my own songs. I had musical training before that, which is why I could get into the composition program at SUNY Purchase, which you can’t just get into without any experience whatsoever.

Listening to those first two records and looking at the credits, even if I didn’t know that you were making those when you were in music school, I think I might have thought so.

Yeah, the fact that I got orchestral instruments…how would any indie/unknown artist do that and then post it on Bandcamp?

Do you think your access to all that stuff guided your writing? Do you think the environment was definitive for the songs?

I feel like what I heard in my head already had orchestral sounds, but if I didn’t have an orchestra I would have done it another way. When I was in school, I looked around and said, “Wow, it would be stupid of me to not use these classical musicians who are willing to play for free, and all these facilities, and all these different resources.” I think it was a combination of both, but ultimately if I didn’t have those resources, I would have put out those songs anyway, in another form. I was just lucky enough to have that.

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Though my first day of this year’s CMJ Music Marathon was spent at events not included in the festival’s schedule, I’m not sure you can say I “skipped CMJ.” In the midst of a tradition 34 years running, everything that happens in the New York music world this week—be it officially sanctioned showcases, anti-establishment bashes specifically meant to counterprogram against corporate sponsored events, or high-profile acts in town to capitalize on an uptick in interested media outlets—is rolled into an amorphous blob called “CMJ.” Would it even be so crazy to call staying inside my apartment on a rainy Wednesday, watching Gilmore Girls on Netflix, and making a mint chocolate milkshake “doing CMJ”? Something to consider.   

Last night I caught sets from Bo Ningen, PCPC, and Thurston Moore. A full accounting follows. 

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Bo Ningen, a Japanese band living in London, are playing a half-dozen shows in New York this week and twice just at Baby’s All Right. Expecting them to live up to their advance billing as hair-spinning kawaii demon riff-monsters right off the bat, for just a handful of people at 6 PM on Day One, was maybe a bit unreasonable. Not that their heavy-metal power riffing was egregiously half-hearted, they’re just wise to pick their spots. Visually, they are striking. Singer Taigen Kawabe’s spooky-thin frame was made more dramatic by a form-fitting floor-length black gown. He sang in high, agitated yelps but between songs his soft-spoken, British-accented English was jarringly gentle. When not playing guitar, he went through elaborate hand and arm motions that could either have been the product of some ancient dramatic tradition, or something he just thinks looks neat.  

By the end of the set they’d worked themselves into form. Kawabe spent the last few songs stalking the sparsely populated floor, adopting improbable crane poses mid-riff before soloing frantically above his head. He vamped wildly for flash photography and sly camera phone shots, while his band hacked away behind him at increasingly worrying time-signatures. It was a nice hint of their potential panache, but I suspected that energy is expended in direct proportion to the number of people they’ve got the opportunity to wow. Expect the rest of their week to be considerably more epic. 

The first few minutes of PCPC‘s debut performance could have been the first few minutes of PCPC’s debut practice. The “supergroup,” or at least “combo-group,” made from Brooklyn bands Parquet Courts and PC Worship, started their set wandering through fields of overgrown drone, never nearing a coherent sound. Then, thankfully, they snapped into higher gear, best foot forward, riffs nearly aligned. It seemed like a conscious put-on from a dedicated prankster. Courts’ singer Andrew Savage would soon claim the band’s acronym stood for “People Committing Psychotic Crimes,” seeming pretty full of shit.

Savage traded vocal responsibilities with PC Worship singer Justin Frye, and Savage has the edge in natural charisma. The songs he led were more elastic and unpredictable and Frye’s more of a sludge-punk bash ’em up, though both styes were executed with conviction. They sounded like a combination of both bands, surprising though it shouldn’t have been. Worship drummer Shannon Sigley was especially pivotal, holding it together with tight thwacks in moments where the boys busied themselves with feedback wrangling. They ended, bleating the title refrain from Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” a move that seemed very 1990s for attempting to re-deflate a classic rock cliche that’d been flat for decades. A Xerox of a Xerox of a zine about a feeling.  

Enthusiasm for the band was strong among a still-thin early crowd who definitely showed up for the headliner. The goodwill was not unconditional. When Savage asked the crowd, “Have you had enough, or are you Thurston for Moore?” there was nary a pity chuckle to be heard. 

“We’re on a tour of Northeast black metal clubs. It’s our penance tour,” said Thurston Moore, earning genuine laughs. Though he was mostly, probably, at least 90% kidding (or maybe just referencing the time he called black metal dudes “pussies of the lowest order”), the offhand comment had the ring of deeper truth. When you’re loved for more than just your music, it can go both ways. Beyond Sonic Youth’s unfuckwithable body of work, Moore was an icon of graceful aging and enlightened manhood. A feminist art guy in a true lifelong soul partnership with a creative equal. That image was probably saintly out of proportion with reality all along. But after spending several decades as Cool Noise Dad to multiple generations, it’s understandable if not entirely fair that fans might feel personally betrayed by changes in personal circumstance. We all picked Kim. 

Still, divorced from that chatter (sorry), his new band sounded fucking great. It sounded more than a little like his old band. Prominently featuring Moore’s gently creaking voice and eerily warped guitar tunings along with eternally steady SY drummer Steve Shelley, it would. The replacement parts are significant. The gut-aimed contribution of Deb Googe, longtime My Bloody Valentine bassist, was extremely formidable. Second guitarist John Sedwards stayed mostly in the background, adding to the wall of pure oomph without demanding the equal spotlight that Lee Ranaldo would have. They kept to the punchier numbers of Moore’s new album, The Best Day, playing a more direct and focused set than I’ve seen him do for a long, long time. After poorly feigning a walk-off, they even encored Moore’s 1995 solo classic “Psychic Hearts” as a straightforward pop-punk blast. 

Focusing just on the music, setting feelings aside, Thurston Moore with something to prove is no minor pleasure.  

                                                                                  Photos by Devon Banks 

This past Saturday Bushwick’s big, handsome, recently revamped venue The Wick held the first show in the ongoing series, “Tinnitus.” Presented by Pitchfork’s recurring metal column, Show No Mercy, and the long-running producer of heavy events, Blackened Music, its programming focuses on “composers of extreme sound” as a loose organizing principe. (A second installment, featuring Tim Hecker, has already been announced for November 12th.) 

The inaugural performance saw Brooklyn’s Julianna Barwick and Iceland’s Ben Frost operating from vastly different ends of the sound spectrum. Thoughts, photos, and maybe a stray Vine or something follow here…

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Julianna Barwick is at a point in her career where playing grand, odd spaces should be her default option. Her experimental devotional music, big and full yet ghostly and unknowable, makes zero sense in some divey rock club. As an ideal setting, a 19th century church is probably unbeatable. The vaulted ceilings and cavernous, unfinished expanse of The Wick suit her as well.                      

As always, the intensely beautiful, deeply physical way Barwick loops her voice to fill space makes still music weirdly compelling. You can see her leaning into notes, coaxing them into the air to join the triggered loops she’s already left floating. Her transparent process of construction is a striking way to make what is essentially sedate ambient music work in a live performance. You could close your eyes, as she usually does, and just appreciate the mass of sound. But watching an inexplicably gorgeous melody accumulate, sculpted brick by brick, holds an unexpected drama. 

A difference in Barwick’s current sets versus those of a few years ago is an increased confidence to utilize instrumental passages with no vocals at all. On Saturday, she let a beautiful piano refrain echo alone for a few minutes before giving it any sort of further embellishment. Towards the end of the set she even triggered some heavy low-end from a drum machine, creating a contrast I can’t recall her trying before. She’s developed her style so deliberately that many possible directions to take her songs remain unattempted, years after achieving a viable signature sound. 

For a man who lives in Iceland but was born in Australia, Ben Frost looks absurdly Nordic. He looks like the sort of brawny but secretly sensitive Viking time-travel-themed romance novels are written about. With immaculate beard and cascading locks, draped all in black down to his bare feet, he had the air of a sexually magnetic cult leader. It was silly, almost. His band consisted of drummer Greg Fox—a prototypically excitable metal dude in reflective pink Bret Hart shades—and lithe, multi-instrumentalist Shazad Ismaily, who looked in strobe-lit silhouette like the kind of generic gray space alien that seemed to abduct a lot more people in the 1980s. Together, they made a hell of a fucking noise. 

Where Barwick was serene and angelic, Frost’s set was epileptic and evil. His band performed selections from this year’s acclaimed A U R O R A album. They delivered tones at ruinous volume, to the point that internal organs not often distinctly noticed within one’s trunk could be identified by the distinct frequency at which they were vibrating. Fox’s only job was to beat his kit like a jazz-schooled gorilla. Ismaily alternated, occasionally wringing synth sustains out of his Moog, more often providing fluid secondary rhythms, from drum pads real and synthetic. Frost’s minute-to-minute purpose was a little more opaque, spanning a sturdy table of assorted electronics in order to trigger loops, or approximate the sound of air burning in the midst of a nuclear detonation. Sometimes he’d step back with an axe to conduct his own guitar feedback. 

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Though pure, body-jellying volume was the set’s primary special effect, it was easy to appreciate the structured movement of the music. It wasn’t just a thrill-seeking ride on the roller coaster. The presence of two live drummers in addition to fast paced synthetic beats gave the show the hedonistic push of late-night dance music just as often as it held the claustrophobic weight of sheer drone.

The crowd, plentiful for an overtly experimental bill in so large a room, was zoned-in throughout, blissed-out faces moving a tad unnaturally in the flashing strobes. The group returned after a rousing ovation for what Frost described as his first ever encore. He bowed with the genuine graciousness of a guy who’d never before been asked. 

That crispness in the air? Your local bodega taking a sudden interest in harvested goods, i.e. selling miniature pumpkins? The barrage of L.L. Bean catalogs sent to your apartment becoming less of an annoyance? This all means that the Northside Concert Series at Brooklyn Flea is winding down for the season. It’s been a good run (many thanks to the bands and fans who made it out), but we’ve got one last swing at summer before calling it the end.Bittersweet synth purveyors Small Black, the deepest feelers in all the borough, show us the way this Sunday. They’ll be joined by head-in-clouds pop project Nicholas Nicholas and noise-and-twee-meeting-point Mitski, whose forthcoming album, literally called Bury Me at Makeout Creek, is emotionally on point.

Gates to the Williamsburg Flea at 50 Kent (Kent Ave & North 12th St) will open at 10am, per usual, with music starting at 3pm and wrapping up around 6pm. It’s practically Christmas. Let’s make this count.

This Sunday marks the halfway point of the “Northside Concert Series at Brooklyn Flea,” which, the more we think about it, isn’t that impressive on our end, seeing as free shows with great bands tend to be low on stress and high on fun. Even still! We’re honoring the occasion with an amped-up lineup led by furiously young Stones-worshippers Twin Peaks from the depths of the American Midwest. On the Brooklyn-till-we-die front, grit-smeared punk from Bushwick’s Honduras and mod pop from borough-bred Roya, a new project from members of Habibi and The Clean, kicks the afternoon into gear.

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Gates to the Williamsburg Flea at 50 Kent (Kent Ave & North 12th St) will open at 10am, per usual, with music starting at 3pm and wrapping up before 6pm. (Fine print: Roya is on at 3pm, Honduras at 3:45pm, and Twin Peaks at 4:45pm.) Keep an eye here for details on the final show of Northside’s concert season on October 5 with Small Black. Their bittersweet synth swirls will guide us into the autumnal glow, so we can awake many months later, post-frost, and do it all over again.