Killing Joke/Ministry Bassist Paul Raven R.I.P.

Photo by Steffan Chirazi

Paul Vincent Raven-- bassist for post-punk pioneers Killing Joke and, in more recent years, industrial elder statesmen Ministry-- was found dead Saturday, October 20 in a private home in a small French village on the border of Switzerland, near Geneva. According to initial reports, his death was the result of a heart attack.

The 46-year-old Raven was in the thick of a couple different musical projects at the time of his death. He was in Geneva to record with French band Treponem Pal, and he planned to release an album by Mob Research-- a collaboration with members of Warrior Soul and the Mission UK-- on Ministry leader Al Jourgensen's 13th Planet Records next year.

After Raven's death, Jourgensen released a statement saying, "I am in total shock. The world of music is a sadder, emptier place. Not only was Raven an extraordinary talent, but one of my closest dearest friends. Our condolences and prayers go to his immediate family. He will be truly missed by artists, musicians, and his fans the world over."

For a statement on behalf of the Raven family, visit Mob Research's MySpace blog here.

A Place to Bury Strangers Shut Down by Cops, Tour

A Place to Bury Strangers: loud enough to necessitate their own line of effects pedals, sure, but loud enough for a brushup with John Law? According to the band's publicist, that's just the handcuff-rattling loudness attendees at last Thursday night's (October 18) CMJ show in NYC were up against. Observe:

"Six policemen stormed A Place to Bury Strangers' set at Loisaida after just two songs following noise complaints from local tenants. The promoter, Vacancy Records' Louise Fenton, was escorted by the officers toward the back of the building to have a word." [See photo above]

Fenton somehow convinced the cops to allow the band one more song, so APTBS did "Ocean", the epic closing track from their self-titled album. "Police officers then reported back to their dispatch to say they were in the process of shutting the event down, but that they were letting the band finish their song first, because, (directly quoted from the officer): 'This band is sick.'"

Dude! That is pretty sick. Saturday's APTBS gig at The Delancey, meanwhile-- at least, as our Marc Hogan told it-- seems to have gone off without a hitch. Another set that day at Glasslands, however, saw the band blowing the power out, according to PR. Easy, guys!

You can catch the entirety of the A Place to Bury Strangers' thing on vinyl tomorrow, or-- if your rap sheet's clean enough-- in person on their smattering of recently announced shows this fall. Those dates after the jump. [MORE...]

Black Lips Add Dates, Get Remixed by Diplo

They may be seasoned world travelers and all, but trouble follows Black Lips no matter where they may roam. So lock up your flats extra tight and keep a watchful eye peeled on any and all oversized spherical structures, United Kingdom, as the Black Lips are headed in your general direction.

The new dates will close a gap between their previously reported U.S. dates (which just wrapped up) and a quick trek to Australia, also filled in by a couple Atlanta area shows with old pals Deerhunter.

If that ain't proof positive of a full-bore British invasion in reverse from these Lips, get a load of this: Vice will press up 250 UK-only white label 7"s for release December 3, featuring Good Bad Not Evil standout "Veni Vidi Vici" on the A-side and "Hippie Hippie Hoorah" on the back.

In other Black Lips news, they've got that split Christmas single with the King Khan & BBQ Show to think about, and if you're willing to part with your e-mail address, you can download Diplo's recent reworking of "Veni Vidi Vici" here (or just stream it at the Lips' MySpace). [MORE...]

Pearls and Brass' Huth Goes Solo on Drag City

Photo by Bradley Fry

We're hard-pressed to think of a better way to shake the label of your band as a "power trio" than to literally unplug, pick up an acoustic guitar, and release a folksy solo album.

Pearls and Brass' Randy Huth plans to do just that. The guitarist and vocalist will defy easy categorization by following The Indian Tower-- his band's 2006 LP-- with the self-titled debut from his Randall of Nazareth solo moniker, so named because of his Nazareth, Pennsylvania origins.

Drag City will release Randall of Nazareth tomorrow, October 23. Randall opens for Om at Johnny Brenda's in Philly on November 15. [MORE...]

Harmonia Reunite for Concert, Live LP

It's hard to imagine Beatlemaniacal excitement at the prospect of a krautrock supergroup. Still, you don't get a much better pedigree than Harmonia, the German trio that consisted of Neu! co-founder and occasional Kraftwerk player Michael Rother and Cluster co-founders Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius.

Harmonia existed for a mere three years (1973-76) and released two albums, Musik Von Harmonia and Deluxe, before motorik-ing back into the musical ether.

But after 31 years of silence, the trio returns with Harmonia Live 1974, a document of their gig at the Penny Station Club-- a former railway station in Griessem, Germany-- on March 23, 1974.

London/Berlin-based label Grönland Records will release Live 1974 overseas today (October 22), and Harmonia have a November 27 show in Berlin (with Barbara Morgenstern opening!) to celebrate.

In fact, all three Harmonia members have dates aside from the one group appearance, including performances by Cluster, Rother & Moebius, and a Roedelius solo show. The latter begins the dates on October 27 in Ojai, California. [MORE...]

Supersilent Set to Unleash LP 8 in the States

Photo by Eirik Lande

Sound the alarm! Norwegian avant-everything collective Supersilent are set for the Stateside release of 8, their first studio album in nearly half a decade and the proper follow-up to 2006's live 7 DVD.

Things like track titles and singles aren't really a concern of Supersilent's, but wild technical details are, so here's a bunch: 8 was recorded over a five day period at Athletic Sound in Halden, Norway, a studio trading in entirely analog equipment. 8 was pared down to 68 minutes from five hours of "finished" music, though the band did consider easing up on the editing to make 8 a double or triple LP monster (just imagine!). 8 was mastered by "mastering guru" Bob Katz (one would think the appropriate title would be "master of mastering," but he's the master) and produced by Deathprod. It's already been nominated for an Alarmprisen, the alternative Norwegian Grammy awards (8 came out in Norway back in September).

And, as a final technicality, 8 can be yours in the U.S. October 23 from Rune Grammofon. Hooray! [MORE...]

U.S. Customs Clears Chris Walla's Hard Drive
Customs rep: "We followed standard operating procedure...and when you start talking about...Guantánamo Bay, you get my ire up."

The saga of Death Cabbie Chris Walla's confiscated hard drive has taken another turn or sorts, one which leads toward something of a denouement.

As reported last week, U.S. Customs officials seized a hard drive containing music files belonging to Walla when a studio employee attempted to take them across the border last month, from Canada into the U.S., near Blaine, Washington. Walla, understandably upset, vented both to MTV.com and on his website just last week. The news spread and was embellished upon-- Did Homeland Security Take Walla's Hard Drive Because of the Political Songs Contained Therein??-- and now, Customs has stepped forward with their side of the story.

Speaking with MTV.com, U.S. Customs and Border Protection rep Mike Milne expressed bewilderment and "ire" at the chain of events that followed from what Milne calls a "standard operating procedure." Said Milne:

"I want to point out very emphatically that the U.S. government, this administration, the Department of Homeland Security and specifically [USCBP] does not censor musical content coming into the United States. Period. That's not the reason this hard drive was kept.

"We followed standard operating procedure...and when you start talking about...Guantánamo Bay [as Walla did in his blog post], you get my ire up. I go on Google News, and I see 125 different news stories out there with the headline 'Homeland Security Seizes Musician's Music', and it strikes me as unfair. And I will be spending the rest of the day trying to contact those people-- The Associated Press, the record company [Barsuk], and Mr. Walla-- to ask them if they can set the record straight."

Milne went on to claim that Walla's drive was taken simply because it was "commercial merchandise" brought to the wrong crossing station without proper documentation.

It also seems Customs has already attempted to contact the person from whom the drive was taken-- Hippowest studio engineer Brandon Brown-- on three occasions to say that the drive was cleared and is available to pick up. Speaking to MTV.com, Brown denied this. "Obviously, I would've gotten the drive if I would've heard from them," he said.

None of this has hampered Walla much. Since tapes sent across the border along with the hard drive made it through, Walla received his music and is still scheduled to release his solo album, Field Manual, through Barsuk on January 29.

Barsuk's Josh Rosenfeld, meanwhile, admits to being "naive" about border crossing procedures (he had originally furnished Brown with a note explaining the transport situation to Customs), but he doesn't completely buy the "commercial merchandise" bit. At the same time, he doesn't feel the confiscation was politically motivated, for obvious reasons. "They had no means of listening to the music on the drive at the time they confiscated it," he told MTV.com.

"[But] it seems like a funny coincidence. I mean, a hard drive containing data, and if it was confiscated for commercial reasons, why would they let him leave with the tapes? There's something that doesn't make sense about the whole concept of it being confiscated for commercial reasons."

Still, Rosenfeld isn't too concerned about the hard drive at this point, and he's grateful for all the press (ha, whoops) that's come out of this. "It'd be nice if we could get the drive back, but the data is already back in the United States. So in some way, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing ranks somewhere on the continuum between questionable and clueless to me."

CMJ: Saturday [Marc Hogan]

Spoon photos by Jason Bergman; AAM Promo day party photos by Ryan Muir; Above: Spoon

The Ponys [Roseland Ballroom; 7:30 p.m.]

Chicago-based four-piece the Ponys might sound like the kind of band that could succeed in a 3,000-plus-capacity room like Roseland, especially on this year's streamlined, consistent Turn the Lights Out. Three albums in, these guys have their live moves down, and their hazy, no-frills indie rock-- Pitchfork's Jason Crock approvingly dubbed it "Sonic Youth Lite"-- seems melodic enough to serve as a gateway to noisier stuff for Spoon's growing fanbase of skirt-chasers and frat boys. It wasn't, however, and it wasn't only the frat boys' fault. Singer/guitarist Jered Gummere's narcoticized murmurs were muddy and indecipherable, and there was a rote detachment to even the too-brief squalls of guitar noise. Maybe, a couple of weeks into their tour with Spoon, the Ponys are beginning to expect a listless audience-- and playing accordingly. "A few more and then Spoon's on," Gummere announced to the biggest cheers of the set. "They're OK, I guess."

Spoon [Roseland Ballroom; 8:30 p.m.]

It's a good time to be a scalper at a sold-out Spoon show. The dudes prowling 52nd Street before the Austin band's Roseland gig were turning would-be buyers away by the taxi-full if they weren't willing to cough up obscene prices. And many were. A half-an-hour before Spoon were officially set to start, one scalper told me he'd sold a ticket for as much as $60, and based on what I overheard, he might not even have been bullshitting. A couple of college-age guys who'd already bought tickets and been thrown out for fake IDs didn't even bother haggling-- they were literally pleading with the man to sell for what they had left in their wallets.



Spoon themselves have achieved a masterful balance between what those guys probably like-- beer, classic rock-- and what I like. It's going to become a precarious position to maintain as their fanbase grows and the media attention increases whenever they put out their next album, but on latest effort Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, the veteran four-piece achieve an expertly calibrated combination of gorgeous experimentation and upbeat, accessible romanticism, sounding as Billy Joel these days as Pixies. Judging by applause levels, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was what many in the thousands-strong crowd were at Roseland to hear.

They got it, and a bit of back catalogue as well, in a concise, electrifying set. I haven't been to a venue this big in a while, so the instant weed smoke during opening song "My Little Japanese Cigarette Case" was good for an inward chuckle. The three-piece horn section on new songs like "Cherry Bomb" or Kill the Moonlight's "Jonathan Fisk" gave the songs a trebly punch, but both songs were uptempo rockers-- music more for fist-pumping and beer-drinking than stoned navel-gazing.





Spoon never let the audience get too comfortable, though. Britt Daniel's hoarse bark went through even the breeziest arrangements, such as in Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga standout "The Underdog". The Radiohead-like "The Ghost of You Lingers" received perhaps the most muted reaction of the night, but the big-venue sound system helped its percussive glitches hit us in the guts after the pulsing synths put us at ease. On "I Turn My Camera On", one of several songs included from 2005's underrated Gimme Fiction, Daniel swapped shouts for falsetto coos, with bassist Rob Pope underpinning some Prince-ly funk. And many of the songs had discordant but economical guitar solos, which Daniel sometimes played with the instrument outstretched and held vertically, like a trophy.

Not that the show was ever flashy or indulgent. Daniel even kept the stage patter to a minimum, finally breaking his silence nearly halfway into the set in order to praise Spoon's label, Merge. I think he later called the show Spoon's biggest ever, though my ears may have missed a qualifying word. When the encore began, Daniel seemed truly impressed by the size of the crowd reaction. "That was a roar," he said tersely. A song later, he reached back to Girls Can Tell for "Everything Hits at Once", finishing the night with Gimme Fiction's "My Mathematical Mind".

"And when you believe, they call it rock and roll," Daniel sang earlier in the night, on "The Beast and the Dragon Adored" (also from Gimme Fiction). As he repeated the phrase, the words "rock and roll" became distorted by tinny echoes, moving from a traditional rock outlook recalling the Lovin' Spoonful to the weirder, wider musical universe also covered by this site. A guy I talked to before the set told me his favorite artists included Led Zeppelin and Tom Petty-- "The stuff our parents used to listen to was actually pretty good," he said. Spoon's challenge going forward will be satisfying both this guy and the guys who also appreciate some weirdness. Tonight, they did both.

A Place to Bury Strangers [The Delancey; 11 p.m.]

A Place to Bury Strangers weren't "the loudest band in New York" this night, as other press outlets and the band's MySpace page proclaim. They might've been the most punctual, though. The industrial-tinged Brooklyn dream-pop three-piece didn't deafen me the way even the piped-in music at the Annex before Black Kids did a couple of evenings ago, but they started (and ended) so promptly that I only caught one-sixth of their six-song set. Not sure how well you know New York geography, but suffice it to say it's a long way from 52nd and Broadway to Delancey St. and the Williamsburg goddamn Bridge. Not their fault.

At least the song I caught was "Ocean", the last track from A Place to Bury Strangers' self-titled debut, and a song that lives up to its title in its immersive vastness. "It's love that controls you," the frontman, Death By Audio chief, and ex-Skywave singer Oliver Ackermann intoned, not exactly with perfect pitch and perhaps a bit too high in the mix. Jay Space's drumming seemed as important as the swirling-but-not-deafening maelstrom of guitar effects, toms bashing all over the beat while the bass drum kept a steady, physical undercurrent.

Eventually, it was an extra burst of percussion that announced the guitars were about to get quite a bit louder. And they did, a piercing ring shining out above Ackermann's squealing, gnashing, vomiting mid-level tones. OK, pretty loud, I guess. Oh yeah, the performance was backed by a black-and-white film projection showing men and women running around in circles in what looked like a game of "Ring Around the Rosie" played in the fiery depths of hell.

AAM Promo Day Party [Music Hall of Williamsburg]

Oh No! Oh My!




Mika Miko




Islands




Will Sheff




...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

CMJ: Saturday [Zach Baron]

Photos by Kathryn Yu; Above: Jesu

New Violators [Mercury Lounge; 7 p.m.]

The New Violators' straightforwardness and honesty of intention-- they are an arena-sized band, in love with Bowie and the Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen and Springsteen and maybe even U2-- has had the paradoxical effect of alienating many who have seen them at South by Southwest, CMJ, and in their own hometown of Trondheim, Norway. Chalk this up, in part, to the band's frontman, Per Borten-- tall, handsome, well dressed, distant, and over the top.

Recently, the New Violators parted ways with their longtime guitarist, and Borten has since assumed double duty, a brilliant idea-- what little they lose in towering stage presence and theatrical appeal, they gain by being tighter, more locked in, less polarizing. Their new songs rely less on Borten's croon and more on his considerable songwriting ability. The material is more ballady; keyboards play more of a role, and the songs are longer and more complex, the influences still there but less obvious. If Springsteen's Americana leanings have come into vogue as an influence and a touchstone for so many new bands, New Violators cop the thing from Springsteen that attracted everyone to him in the first place: huge ambition and blatantly outsized songs.

I will resort to begging: somebody, please, put out this band's record.

Torche [Blender Theatre at Gramercy; 9 p.m.]

The Miami, Fla., quartet Torche-- say "Torch," that's what they do-- emerged from the rubble of Floor, an on-and-off Florida band renowned in some circles for their long-unreleased LP, Dove, recorded in 1994. Floor's legend circulated for some time before the band had a record out-- an oversight they remedied in 2001, when they released a self-titled album and then, eventually, Dove. After their 2004 breakup, those two records came to bookend the existence of a band few outside of Florida were aware of until they were almost finished. Torche formed shortly afterward, filling the void.







At the Gramercy, the band took the stage under the theater's busy light show, pounding away at a deafening single chord. The venue was packed-- a reminder that though certain bands may dominate all discussions of the festival, a journeyman metal group has a much easier time piecing a crowd together than does your average internet phenom. Like Floor, the band vibes Jane's Addiction as much as any other heavy predecessor-- angelic, soaring vocals, mountains of dialed-up guitars, a deliberate pace, and long, ocean-sized songs. Though Jesu was likely the band people had come to see, it was Torche that had most of the crowd bending rhythmically at the waist and neck, swaying as if in prayer.

Jesu [Blender Theatre at Gramercy; 10 p.m.]

Justin Broadrick's obsession with the non-metal aspects of his band's sound-- the suicidal wistfulness, silky drones and muted vocals-- has spilled over into his band's live set: "Turn everything up! It's too fucking quiet," yelled a surprisingly audible audience dude.





Lifeline, Broadrick's latest, suffered a bit from being so straightforward: without multiple layers to sift through, Jesu can sound thin, or underwritten. Live, it's clear that Broadrick is experimenting, seeing how light a touch he can employ and still make crowds feel the weight; still, after Torche's pummeling stand, it was odd to hear people's random chatter crest over the music. Like many other moments at CMJ, the whole thing was a little too transparent-- after seeing so much industry in motion, you begin wish someone would just drop the curtain again.

CMJ: Saturday [Amy Phillips]

Photos by William Kirk; Above: Band of Horses

Justice [Terminal 5; 9 p.m.]


As Justice's current tour made its way across North America over the past few weeks, reader emails bearing tales of mayhem hit Pitchfork's inbox. Rowdy mosh pits, fights, and collapsing stage-front barricades seem to follow Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay wherever they go, as our continent goes crazy for the MTV-approved Frenchmen bearing Brontosaurus riffs and caveman beats.

So when the tour hit Terminal 5 last night, I expected mass fainting, orgies, speaking in tongues. At least a little bloodshed. Well, the sold-out crowd was pumped, but not that pumped. There was a bit of pushing and lots of jumping up and down and headbanging, but no stage-diving or crowd-surfing or circle pits or anything like that. Honestly, people went crazier for M.I.A. the night before.



Regardless, Justice themselves seemed pretty stoked, or as stoked as two dudes dressed in black leather with cigarettes perpetually dangling from their lips will allow themselves to appear. But they're still just a couple guys fiddling with electronics from behind a big glowing cross. Not much to look at. No space pyramid or robot costumes or lasers or insane light show-- though the lighting guy did seem overly fond of strobes.



Augé and de Rosnay let the music provide the pyrotechnics. Tracks like "Waters of Nazareth", "Let There Be Light", and "Stress" sound great on headphones, but they're beyond massive when blasting from a killer soundsystem. Justice retained their playful side, teasing "D.A.N.C.E." throughout the night and throwing Soulwax's "NY Excuse", Klaxons' "Atlantis to Interzone", and even Metallica's "Master of Puppets" in the mix.



Terminal 5, basically a big steel cage, is perfect for an act like Justice. Where better to experience their music than a sexy jail? (Yes, I know the answer: a church. Har har.) And when the concert experience is more about watching the crowd than the performers, the venue's two-tiered balcony is perfect for viewing the main floor.

Although Terminal 5 has a capacity of 3,000, due to its narrowness it feels quite intimate. That intimacy was magnified a thousandfold during "We Are Your Friends", as the crowd chanted the chorus together in a big moment of bonding. Justice cut the music away, so that it was just one big happy chant. It was so much fun, people couldn't resist starting up again when the show was over.

Band of Horses [Bowery Ballroom; 12 a.m.]


Pretty much any venue that isn't out on a big, open prairie or carved into the side of a mountain probably isn't the perfect setting to see Band of Horses. Their wide, sky-scraping songs are made for the great outdoors. But festival season is over, and I'm not heading to the Gorge or Red Rocks any time soon, so a dark, packed club on the Lower East Side will have to do.





Luckily, lead Horseman Ben Bridwell's songs are strong enough to transcend setting, especially when he and his band are in a good mood like they were last night. Bridwell adores the Bowery Ballroom, as he repeatedly reminded us, and adores his label, Sub Pop, who the band honored with a mid-set toast.

The positive vibes seeped into Band of Horses' mellower, sadder songs, giving them a warm fuzzy feel, and amped up the rocking ones. Although Bridwell's lap steel remained on stage throughout the set, he only played a few songs sitting down. Mostly he stood, rocking out with fist in the air or hands demurely behind his back, that ever-flowing beard getting more impressive every day. He was especially excited to play a classic rawk double-neck guitar, which sounded as beautiful as it looked silly.



I like the new Band of Horses album Cease to Begin a whole lot. I think they make a helluva good country-rock band. And tunes like "Is There a Ghost", "Islands on the Coast", and "Ode to LRC" held their own against Everything All the Time's gems. The band was clearly stoked to play the new songs, and that excitement was palpable.

CMJ: Friday [Marc Hogan]

Photos by Jason Bergman; Above: Company Flow

El-P and Company Flow [Music Hall of Williamsburg; 11 p.m.]
















It's been nearly 15 years since El-P, born Jaime Meline, dropped his first vinyl as part of influential alternative hip-hop group Company Flow. Between his label efforts and his rapping, El-P has had plenty of time to assemble one of the most fanatical and diverse cult followings at CMJ-- everyone from the typical Williamsburg denizens to thick-necked ex-jocks. "I live where you live, Brooklyn," El-Producto declared in his set closing the showcase for Def Jux, the label he runs and co-founded.

El-P's main set played up the craziness he repeatedly claimed in interviews for new album I'll Sleep When You're Dead. "I'm losing my goddamn mind, period," he said at another point. He came onstage to Gary Jules' abysmal Tears for Fears cover, "Mad World", so apparently, yeah. The performance itself was as animated as it was vaguely anachronistic. El-P screamed himself fucking hoarse, peppering injunctions to say "yeah" or "put your hands in the air" between lyrics darkened by political fury, arrangements combining old-school sampling and a bit of rock aggression. "Is that all you got for me?" he said at one point, when the applause from the back fell clearly short of the equally batshit devotion up front.

At one point El-P welcomed "the newest member of Def Jux": No, not Danny!, who ably emceed the event, but underground rap icon Del tha Funkee Homosapien. Del's agile flow was a highlight capping an evening of likeably enthusiastic rappers such as Junk Science and Hanger 18. "Please listen to my album, even if you're white as talcum," Del spit on classic "Catch a Bad One", from 1993's No Need for Alarm.

The biggest guest appearance, however, came in the encore. As hinted at in a previous report, El-P took the stage with Bigg Jus, reuniting two-thirds of Company Flow for the first time since early this century. The reason for the reunion? "We love hip-hop music," El-P said from the stage. The reformed duo played old joints like "Population Control", "Vital Nerve", and "Steps to Perfection". Years after the words were written, here was El-P, again: "I don't try to be different/ I am." During one interlude, he observed, "It probably will be about a decade before we do that song again."

BONUS PHOTOS, WOOT!

Yak Ballz [Music Hall of Williamsburg; 10:10 p.m.]





 
Hangar 18 [Music Hall of Williamsburg; 10:30 p.m.]





 
Del Tha Funkee Homosapien [Music Hall of Williamsburg]


 

CMJ: Friday [Amy Phillips]

Photos by William Kirk; Above: M.I.A.

M.I.A. [Terminal 5; 8 p.m.]

M.I.A. just keeps getting better and better. She owned Terminal 5, her megawatt personality ricocheting off of the brand new West Side venue's cavernous steel interior with as much force as her beats.

Accompanied by DJ Low Budget and sidekick Cherry-- and a hyperactive set of videos on a screen behind the stage-- M.I.A. played an hour-and-a-half set containing pretty much every good song she's ever recorded. And she somehow found time to mash-up New Order's "Blue Monday" with "Jimmy", "10 Dollar" with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", and most thrillingly, "Galang" with Lil Mama's "Lip Gloss". The latter served as a reminder of how much the mainstream pop/dance/rap landscape has shifted since M.I.A. first appeared in 2004, and how much certain megahits have come to resemble her sound. (Fortunately, Fergie's "London Bridge" didn't make an appearance.)

The giddy highlight of the set occurred with "Bird Flu", when M.I.A. encouraged fans to join her on stage. Soon, she was surrounded by a large crowd of cool kids of all races and ethnic backgrounds boogieing to the stuttering beat. As the singer herself melted into the crowd, her voice just one among many shouting the lyrics, the spectacle became a kind of word-into-flesh enactment of the multi-culti vision M.I.A. preaches.

Bonus rock star sightings: Nick Zinner and Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the V.I.P. section-- Chase taking notes throughout M.I.A.'s performance! (What could he be studying?) Pavement's Mark Ibold on the street after the show checking out a bureau that someone had thrown in the trash!

MGMT [Crash Mansion; 12 a.m.]






Some might say MGMT are in the right place at the right time. Their debut album Oracular Spectacular (produced by Dave Fridmann) is out now on Columbia Records, they're on tour with Of Montreal, and their CMJ showcase was packed. They're officially a "buzz band."

But as I watched these guys play, I realized something: MGMT represent a whole lot about what is wrong with the music industry right now.

Let me back up a bit. In July, Pitchfork ran a news story about Of Montreal's fall tour. MGMT's publicist gave us an mp3 of the song "Time to Pretend" to include with the story. I fell for "Time to Pretend"-- it's got a nice loping beat, a sugary melody, and tongue-in-cheek lyrics that somehow don't come across as asinine. So far so good.

In September, I received a strange package via FedEx. It was the MGMT promo…on cassette. And a cassette player/recorder. Well, that's one way to avoid a leak. But is it really worth the amount of money it costs to FedEx a bulky tape recorder to who knows how many journalists?

A week later, the Pitchfork office received several copies of Oracular Spectacular, with no watermarks or security protection or anything. Guess they don't care about MGMT leaks so much after all.

"Time to Pretend" is by far the best song on Oracular Spectacular, though "Kids" isn't bad. And, um, that's about it. I'd tell you more about the other songs on it if I could remember any of them. There's a bit of typically hazy Fridmann psychedelics, some kinda trippy outer space stuff. Yet every time I put the damn thing on, the next thing I know the album's over and I didn't even realize I was listening to it.

But because "Time to Pretend" is so good, I decided to give MGMT a chance at CMJ. Maybe the live setting is where the magic really is, where I'd experience whatever it is that first captivated that key Columbia Records A&R person.

Well, you know what MGMT sound like live? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Their music and stage presence are so bland, we all might as well have been staring at a brick wall. This show happened a few hours ago, and I couldn't tell you what any of the band members look like, or hum anything they played. The crowd seemed just as bored as I was, bobbing up and down mildly, mostly text-messaging and checking their CMJ guides to see who else was playing nearby.

Admittedly, I left after four songs. I didn't even stick around for "Time to Pretend". Maybe the fifth song brought dancing girls, confetti, and a cover of "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" with a guest appearance by Meat Loaf himself.

I wish MGMT were actually bad. Like, super cheesy or technically inept or offensive or emotional trainwrecks. Or something. ANYTHING. Instead, they were just nothing.

I'm sorry to pick on MGMT; obviously I'm setting them up as a straw man. As my friends and co-workers know, I'm a pretty harsh music fan. (I mean, I don't even like In Rainbows that much.) And hey, at least MGMT have one good song, which is much more than I can say for most artists!

I'm also pretty bad at predicting the future. The last person I begged people to ignore was Amy Winehouse. Maybe MGMT will one day become the greatest band ever in the history of the universe, and they will magically convince the entire world that paying for music is awesome.

But for now, when the major label system is in its death throes, and yet labels are still throwing money away on inane promotional schemes for bands with no character, no following, and little potential, it's hard to have much sympathy.

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)