So, last night was the big opening night of CMJ in NY. I know I'm not the
first to post a review of this, so skip it if you missed the show and will
just get jealous and upset by reading it. Read it if you want to hear my
opinions on the show, which'll probably make a lot of you mad anyway. ;)
First up was Fluke, whom I had never heard before. Didn't like the singing
at all, it felt (and someone told me it _was_) tacked on. Plus, the volume
on the female singer's mic must have been at like 1/8th of the frontman
guy's. I didn't really stick around for this, went downstairs to look for
the djs, but they were nowhere to be found.
Next came the Sneaker Pimps, I believe, who were kinda cool just for the
sake of variety. The visuals on the back of the stage were interesting, lots
of pictures looping around and stuff.
Daft Punk: Ugh. I didn't enjoy this at all.. Their music was just really
uninteresting to me, but the lights coming out of their keyboards were cool.
I thought it was lame how whenever they dropped everything out of the mix
but a 4/4 beat, they crowd went nuts. The closer, though, Around the World,
was pretty well done.
Death in Vegas was up next, and man, their second track was the highlight of
the night thus far. It was a fun dubbish kinda song .. however, the sound
quality for most of the other songs was muddy and detracted from the show.
Crystal Method: Seemed like this is why most of the people were here. Some
fellow in front of me was dancin like mad, so I guess that's good. They
prefixed their set with a bunch of smoke pouring onto the audience. I was
pretty sick of dance music by this time of the night (hell, I'm almost
always sick of dance music) and didn't dig it too much. They dropped out and
brought back their beats often and very, very predictably, and used the same
'tricks' in practically every song. Annoying.
Finally, around 2 or 2:30, Aphex made his big appearance. He was on a couch,
and most of his equiptment looked to be hidden behind some big black boxes.
He played all tracks from either sawI or RDJ Album, with the exception of
diggeridoo, I believe. The dancing bears were great, much cooler than I
imagined them being. Suprising fact: no Girl/Boy in the set. Favorite track
here was probably heliosphan; very nice.
After reading this it probably looks like I had a pretty darn negative
opinion of most of the bands at the show. Guess I do, but it was still a
good time. Someone mentioned that he thought the last two acts had a much
higher volume than the others; I totally noticed it too. My biggest
complaint would have to be the fact that the djs were playing downstairs, at
the same time as the live acts. Silly; they should have organized that
better. ALSO, some official looking guy said that they'd be playing down
there till the wee hours of the morning, like 6 or so, but when I came
downstairs after Aphex, they were just cleanin up.
noah
np: Barbola Work, BDP