The CMJ Music Marathon is an extremely rare New York City phenomenon: one that gives tourists an advantage. While Brooklyn bands are ubiquitous at the CMJ showcases, mileage traveled means a band has achieved escape velocity from its hometown; it’s one form of quality control. So most of the bands I saw on Tuesday, day one of CMJ, were out-of-towners, including a lucky run of three English bands: Happyness, the Crookes and Money, all of them proof that guitar-driven rock is not extinct—a bedrock tenet of CMJ.
CMJ 2014
Reports, photos and playlists from the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City.
Happyness, a three-man band whose guitarist and bassist swapped instruments a few times, would have sounded at home on 1990’s college radio alongside Pavement, Oasis, the Replacements and Husker Du. Its songs have grunge in their guitar tones, skipped beats in their structures and exuberant falsetto oohs popping out of their choruses; they also have a matter-of-factly sardonic mindset that’s distinctly British. “The more I talk to you the more I like my dog/So I take him out when you come round,” went a line from “Great Minds Think Alike, All Brains Taste the Same.” The songs have a promisingly wily undertone.
Like Happyness, the Crookes prize taut song construction; each guitar line and drum fill was neatly placed. But the Crookes’s three-minute songs were slightly less cryptic, often revolving around tormented love. They also reached further back along the rock timeline: toward the tremulously urgent lead vocals and guitar reverb of the Smiths and toward the British Invasion era, with Beatles chord changes, Merseybeat swing and the folk-rock guitars of the Searchers.
Each song charged ahead; George Waite, the lead singer and bassist, emoted through them with head shakes and twitching legs, even as he nailed each bass line precisely. For a finale, the Crookes went down into the crowd to grab a beer and busk; an untethered Mr. Waite was jumping all over the place. The tactics were old-fashioned, but the youthful fervor was real. Daring anyone to tag them as retro, the Crookes had prefaced their set with the recording of “You Give a Little Love” from the “Bugsy Malone” soundtrack, with the lyrics, “We could have been anything that we wanted to be.”
Money offered a very different approach: not the crisp blueprints of Happyness or the Crookes but a giant watercolor mural, grand and edgeless. The rhythm section gave the songs a tidal, rolling momentum, sometimes a waltz or something like a sea chantey; the guitars rippled and billowed up above. One guitarist spent much of the set picking high, reverberating arpeggios, pinging like distant bells. And the singer, Jamie Lee, proffered thoughts of exalted love and desperate self-doubt: “I’m not ashamed of what I’m doing/But I’m ashamed of what I’ve done,” he declared in “Hold Me Forever.” The songs took their time, with crescendos swelling and ebbing from within. When the music eventually coalesced for the set’s a big marchlike finish, the music inevitably fell under the shadow of U2. But until then, Money had opened an emotional landscape of its own.
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