"New Song, Same Faces" (BrooklynVegan Showcase - Ponytail et al @ M-How, CMJ 2008 Day 1)

"Hi!  Hellooooooooooo!  Isn't this great?  I'm making sounds!  Souwwwwwwwwndsa!  Words?  Maybe!  Is ‘Ooo! Ooo! Ekibwbwbwbwbwbrrbllzah!' a word?  Why not?  Cool!  What are words but sounds?  Souwwwwwwwwndsa!  Mashed together!  A-ha!  Yeah!  Yaaaaaay!  My lungs are aaaaaaah then ooooooh and my throat is whoosh and my tongue is oylallallul and my lips are brppple-oooooooooooooooo.  Tell me that's not the most exciting thing you've ever heard?!  Let's see if that sounds better over here!  And over here!  And while I jump and while I make this face!  Wow!  Whooo!  A-ha!  Yeah!  Yaaaaaaay!  I am making sounds!  And that guy back there, too, beating on shit whamwham and those two guys with their strumstrumtickplucksqueal.  Sometimes together, sometimes not so much!  Rheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Isn't that fantastic?  Rheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Music?  Sure!  What is music but sounds?  Souwwwwwwwndsa!  Mashed together!   Yay!  It takes all this movement to make sound and the sound makes me move more and it's not about going in dizzy dizzy dizzy circles it's about wholeness wholeness sound and movement.  Auyooooooooooooooghradddabee-bee!  There!  Hoooo!  And are my sounds words and our music songs I don't know and don't care because that's about organizing space and that's something for brains and brains don't make any sound on their own (maybe squishsquishsquish when you jump up and down on one ewwwwww!  wheeeee!).  A-ha!  Hahahahahaha!  This is about aaaaah ooooh  whoosh oylallallul brpppple-oooooooo whamstrumsqueal.  This is about wholeness!  This is great!  I wonder if that was a song?  Hooray!  Hey!  Let's do that again!  Hi!"

That is a Ponytail (myspace) song.  That is every Ponytail song, God bless them.  Their album Ice Cream Spiritual is fine, but their live show is tripleplus good, nine thousand stars, forty-seven big thumbs up up up.

Somebody book these kids on Yo Gabba Gabba now.

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Any day I get to see Emmy twice (here, and at the Music Slut's afternoon thang) is a good one.  Though the percentage of Emmy in Emmy the Great has gotten smaller - today they were a six-piece! - and though she deviously devises set lists so as to avoid whatever songs of hers I want to hear.  A couple new songs, including the title track from her eventually forthcoming maybe CD First Love.  I'm not sure where I'm at with singing about "Hallelujah - the original Leonard Cohen version" before quoting same in the chorus.  Like most of her stuff, I'll probably first get used to it, then learn to love it.  She's got six (!) more CMJ performances listed on her myspace, do yourself some good and get to one of them.

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You kids all know the foundation for this Passion Pit stuff you're so eager to go nuts over is serious schmaltz, right?  That if you slow their tunes just a smidge and sandpaper off some of the fuzzier synth stuff, you wind up hearing late-era Chicago ballads?  That the singer, with his shrill, inaccurate falsetto, secretly longs to be Peter Cetera?

And once you're okay with that, try to reconcile yourself with the fact this dance band is just lousy at harnessing and manipulating energy.  It's all put together poorly, either frustrating or dull.

They could get better!  But if I'm going to listen to anything remotely related to that Chicago frontdouche it's going to come from Hair Supply's alter-ego "Et Cetera, The World's Greatest Heavy Metal Tribute to Peter Cetera."  Next!

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I like Shearwater, and I like them better live than on record, but they would be so much better if so many of their songs didn't sound like meticulously arranged song fragments.  Climax and closure, it's good for the soul.  Also, all the bowed glockenspiels and finger-cymbal high-hat dicking around don't count for much if your mood can't survive the boom of a knocked over mic stand.  Our indie rock, it's so fwagile!

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Also there:

Billboard, Brooklyn Vegan (1 2 3), CMJ, Escape Sounds, Free Williamsburg, Idolator, KSCR, L Magazine, Look at Me, I Made a Blog, Music Snobbery, New York Times, Pitchfork, Subterranean Blog, T-Sides

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I think I saw some other bands too.  Whatever.  This was the only full day of CMJ I'm doing this year (and it was great seeing all you kids from way back).  I might be kicking around Friday night, and both the rare (and steeply priced) US appearance of Ms. Róisín Murphy (Ruby Blue was a tremendous album) and the first NYC appearance of Lucky Soul ("I Ain't Never Been Cool" is a great song) are tempting.

tags: ponytail  cmj 2008  cmj  emmy the great  

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