strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Oct 27 03: post-show report
So on Friday I went to see the Innocence Mission play at The Living Room, a little club down on the Lower East Side. I’d been looking forward to this for days. As I made my way through the neighborhood I noticed that even for a Friday on the LES, the place’s hipster density was unusually high. But then I understood: CMJ!
CMJ, or the College Music Journal New Music Marathon, is a six-day extravaganza of up-and-coming indie bands (and former up-and-coming indie bands and would-be up-and-coming indie bands) playing in clubs and bars and dance halls all over New York City. It is a hipster feeding frenzy. Needless to say, I had never been to a CMJ show.
The Innocence Mission were playing a thirty-minute set at 8:45. Or at least they were supposed to: the band that preceded them in line didn’t get started until 8:40. But hey, it was a free concert, and the band (a buncha kids from Detroit by the name of Pas/Cal) wasn’t bad. During their set I perused a CMJ program that the woman sharing my table lent me, and rediscovered the best part of CMJ: it’s an extravaganza of excellent band names. My personal favorite was the truly inspired Measles Mumps Rubella. Some other highlights:
- +/- (Plus/Minus)
- Armor for Sheep
- Asteroid No. 4
- Dillinger Escape Plan
- Dorkestra
- Fin Fang Foom
- The Hissyfits
- Joanie Loves Trotsky
…Oh, man. It just went on and on. You get the picture. (You can still peruse the complete list, if you like.)
Anyway, the show was great. Don and Karen Peris, the husband-and-wife nucleus of the band, did 30 minutes of songs with one guitar apiece. And that was it: a no-frills approach that suited their gentle, folky music perfectly. They struck me as being seriously out of place in the swirl of 24-year-old-rock-and-rollers, but the audience ate it up. Good for them. I happened to bump into Karen, the singer-songwriter-frontwoman, on the way out, and am kind of embarrassed to say that my attempt at a cool, mature “You know, I’ve been a fan of yours for nearly 15 years and y’all are great” kind of devolved into a gush. So much for hipsterism, but what the hell. It was worth it.