Foals at The Music Hall (10/17/07)

A Place To Bury Strangers at The Music Hall (10/17/07)

(Photo Courtesy of Abbey Braden/Punkphoto.com)

Jon Pareles, chief pop music critic for the New York Times mentioned no less than three After The Jump Fest bands in his CMJ wrap up today. Check out the quote below:

It’s impossible to hear more than a small percentage of the performers. For me those deserving a follow-up included Dragons of Zynth, a New York band with a roiling, constantly shifting mixture of psychedelia and minimalism, power-trio riffs and contrapuntal vocals; Marla Hansen, who sang pensive, serene songs accompanied only by a plucked viola; Foals, playing layered, pointillistic dance rock; Yeasayer, which melded a sustained synthesizer foundation with light-fingered African and Celtic countermelodies and apocalyptic thoughts; Torche, which pounded out monumentally slow-grinding heavy metal; and Jesu, whose equally slow hard rock tolled with grandly consonant major chords.

Other bands had an enjoyable revivalist streak. On the rock side there were Wooden Shjips, reviving the hippie drone-jams of the 1960s, and A Place to Bury Strangers, reviving the ominous, feedback-drenched drones of the 1980s. Ghostland Observatory and We Are Wolves brought back analog synthesizer riffs from the electro era. In hip-hop the Cool Kids, from Chicago, longed to go back to 1988, with clever rhymes about subjects other than crime and raw sex, while Spank Rock brought back the fixation on “Bootay” “” his spelling “” that once got 2 Live Crew prosecuted for obscenity. [Play Well, and May the Blog Buzz Be With You – NYTimes.com]

Yeasayer at The Music Hall (10/17/07)

(Photo Courtesy of Abbey Braden/Punkphoto.com)