A Map to the Underground

This Wednesday the 25th annual CMJ Music Marathon kicks off. The music festival will run through Saturday, bringing thousands of performers and fans to the city. At night musicians will descend on the city’s music venues. Headliners from previous CMJ festivals – like Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and Modest Mouse – have escaped from the former indie ghetto to make major pop successes. This year offers a new folk implosion – with acts like Devendra Banhart, Dungen, Feist, and Coco Rosie – but also much, much more. As you try to sort through the endless options, Bret McCabe and Martin Edlund present our lineup of who to see this year.WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14DUNGEN Maxwell’s, 10 p.m.Dungen frontman Gustav Ejstes is an avowed fan of traditional Swedish folk music. Before recording his self-titled 2001 debut, he holed up in his mother’s Smaland farmhouse until he could play all the instruments he heard on his favorite recordings. Then he tried to cram them all into his own ambulatory songs. More recently, he has broken his band into the international underground with the straight-ahead psych-rock blast of 2004’s “Ta Det Lugnt,” a success made all the more remarkable by the fact that all the lyrics are performed in Swedish. It’s the late 1960s all over again – only blonder and more lilting. (M.E.)BRAZILIAN GIRLS Irving Plaza, 11 p.m.Anybody who has a problem with an Italian-German brunette who can sing bubbly good cheer in five languages needs to have their head examined. Sabina Sciubba peppers the effervescent music of New York’s Brazilian Girls with English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish vocals, making the band’s songs feel like a jet-setting tour of European discos. Brazilian Girls’s backing beats are just as globe-trotting, percolating from cool-breeze 1960s Ipanema washes and joyful French pop to pulsating 1980s synth-jolts and every sort of cosmic cocktail in between. It’s a permanent vacation spirit that permeates the quartet’s 2005 self-titled Verve debut and keeps the blood racing when they hit the stage. (B.M.)FEIST Knitting Factory, 11:30 p.m.Calgary’s Leslie Feist sprouted out of a rocking punk band, and she injects that sort of restless energy into her dark-hued electro-pop on her 2004 album “Let It Die.” Feist’s moody songs are the shadows cast by perky indie-pop, as her lyrics gravitate more toward life’s mundane, bittersweet moments than ecstatic peaks and depressing valleys. The title track on “Let it Die” refers not to life’s end but love’s beginning as she laments “Don’t you wish we could forget that kiss?” in her plaintive vibrato before admitting “Now I know what I don’t want / I learned that with you.” She is not a singer-songwriter tracing a Cat Power downward spiral, but a young woman who realized early on that she is going to take a few wrong turns on the way to where she’s going. (B.M.)DEVENDRA BANHART AND HAIRY FAIRY Bowery Ballroom, 11:30 p.m.Devendra Banhart is still the freakiest of the freak-folk set, but on “Cripple Crow,” his fourth album (and first for XL Recordings), pleasant finger plucking and easy harmonies now flower where fantastical dreamscapes and dizzying vibrato used to reign. But don’t let this dissuade you from seeing him live – a setting that always holds the potential for spontaneous hootenanny weirdness. He is joined by backing band Hairy Fairy, which does a fine job of fleshing out his spare songs, particularly when its members opt to plug in. Devendra goes electric! (M.E.)AQUEDUCT Mercury Lounge, midnightJOHN VANDERSLICE Mercury Lounge, 1 a.m.John Vanderslice is the Beck you’ve never heard of. His eclectic albums are consistently high-minded and hi-fi, owing in part to his ready access to Tiny Telephone, the San Francisco studio he has turned into a favorite recording destination for discriminating Left Coast indie rockers. Nowhere are these assets better demonstrated than on “Pixel Revolt,” Vanderslice’s lush and literary new album. Seattle (by way of Oklahoma) band Aqueduct writes playful, poppy odes to 1980s innocence – G ‘N’ R; video games – using sometimes retro orchestration: keyboards, pianos, drum machines, and guitars. With Death Cab for Cutie having decamped for Atlantic, the two groups ably carry the banner of Seattle’s no-longer-teensy Barsuk Records. (M.E.)THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15LADY SOVEREIGN Webster Hall, 8 p.m.Pint-sized 19-year-old Londoner Louise Harman, aka Lady Sovereign, may look like she is but a wee pre-teen, but she is a giant presence on the microphone. The next generation of U.K. grime – that peculiarly jagged amalgamation of shattered two-step dance beats and hip-hop – Lady Sov is a force of nature, if only in her own mind. With a darting and slashing vocal style that is both young-woman adorable and working-class British gruff, Lady Sov’s currently available singles – “Random,” “Ch-Ching,” and “9 to 5”- spotlight a colorful personality so adept with the sneak-attack insult and non sequitur rhyme that marketers are already dubbing her Feminem. The real measure of her verbal dexterity comes in October, with the release of her debut album, but since girlfriend did brush off living hand-to-mouth in “Ch-Ching” with the daft quip “Don’t have my own room / I don’t even share / Just slept on a sofa that’s the size of a chair,” here’s hoping there’s more cheeky where that came from. (B.M.)TIA CARRERA Trash, 8 p.m.GORCH FOCK Trash, 10 p.m.Texas bands have never settled for delivering rock in traditional fashion. Tonight two Austin hammers offer different approaches to making huge wallops. Tia Carrera is the Lone Star state’s idea of a power-trio, combining the heavy-psych flail of Major Stars with the confrontational instrumental overdrive of a really shredding trash-metal band. Gorch Fock, meanwhile, really has to be seen to be appreciated. This septet – two drummers, three guitarists, a bassist, and, the icing on the cake, a trombonist – whip up tidal waves of reverberating, tribal big-bore rock in a Jesus Lizard vein, delivered with the manic intensity that comes from having almost half a rugby team. (B.M.)NAUTICAL ALMANAC Hook, 10 p.m.CARLOS GIFFONI Hook, 11:30 p.m.Baltimore’s Nautical Almanac, the inspired duo of Carly Ptak and Twig Harper, are the oddest of the oddballs who comprise the contemporary noise underground. Not content merely to divine bizarre electronic sounds and wig out onstage, there is a rigorous method to Nautical Almanac’s madness. Its aggressive glitch record, 2004’s “Rooting for the Microbes,” was made entirely on homemade, human-powered instruments. This music is a one-way immersion into an otherworldly dimension, but rarely do the pilots take you there with such affable wit. New York’s No Fun Fest-organizer Carlos Giffoni deals in straight-up laptop terror – and discovers singular moments of serene beauty in the process of ripping sounds apart. (B.M.)TARANTULA A.D. Bowery Ballroom, 10:45 p.m.Cinematic and spooky, Tarantula A.D. picks up where Godspeed You Black Emperor leaves off. With its slanted-and-enchanted gypsy strings, bursts of death-metal guitar, and topsy-turvy time signatures, a Tarantula A.D. set can be exhausting, but it’s equally cathartic – a fact attested to by the band’s loyal following. Their new album, “Book of Sand,” is an epic without even a whiff of a plot, but plenty of big battle scenes and gore – the ideal purgative for ears and mind between endless sessions of sound-alike garage, emo, and folk rockers. (M.E.)LITTLE BROTHER B.B. King Blues Club, 12:15 a.m.Catch this North Carolina trio in a smaller club while you can, because Little Brother’s upcoming “The Minstrel Show” might catapult the group to Common status. A seamlessly moving concept album on par with De La Soul’s unsung “De La Soul Is Dead,” “The Minstrel Show” captures DJ/producer 9th Wonder hitting Madlib levels of beat chemistry, sculpting waves as silky as A Tribe Called Quest jams and as swelling positive forces as Blackalicious. These rhythmic ribbons form a lithe spine over which MCs Big Pooh and Phonte trade rhymes as casually impressive as they are instantly memorable. (B.M.)FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 16MORE DOGS Scenic, 7:50 p.m.TY BRAXTON Scenic, 9:30 p.m.Baltimore’s More Dogs sound like an Eastern European wedding band that stumbled upon a copy of Tom Waits’s “Swordfishtrombones” and fell in love with everything but the singing. The instrumental trio works with a smorgasbord of sounds – guitar, bass, drums, vibes, organ, other percussion instruments, wood blocks, whistles, and virtually anything else that can be struck – and stitches together a carnivalesque flurry of melodic polyphony. In the band Battles, Brooklyn’s Ty Braxton helps smelt the best alloy of dance-music and angular rock on this side of the Atlantic. Solo, he is a shaman of experimental drones, loops, and laptop mantras, working a floor strewn with objects and pedals in sets that verge on hallucinatory performance art. (B.M.)PONY UP! Northsix, 8:45 p.m.In Pony Up!, the teen confusion of Liz Phair and the angsty feminism of Sleater Kinney are channeled into whip-smart love letters to Marlon Brando and Matthew Modine. These pop culture-saturated post-riot girls are light years ahead of the boys they encounter, but they go ahead and make out with them anyway: “If I left you wouldn’t miss me I don’t care shut up and kiss me,” sings lead sass-er Camilla Wynne Ingr in the opening cut from their self-titled EP. The entire record sounds like it was tossed off at a sleepover, but it is saved from becoming too cloying by savage, knee-high-socks wit and tongue-in-cheek delivery. (M.E.)SMOOSH Warsaw, 8:50 p.m.Many indie rock bands play at childlike naivete, but Seattle’s Smoosh is the genuine article: sisters Asya and Chloe are 13 and 11 respectively. Despite their age, the duo can lay claim to an impeccable indie-rock pedigree. Death Cab for Cutie member Jason McGerr taught them drums and helped arrange their songs; they’ve played with such independent darlings as Jimmy Eat World, Mates of State, and Rilo Kiley; and Cat Power’s Chan Marshall paid them the ultimate compliment of lip-syncing to one of their songs at a music festival. But what’s most novel about this inescapable novelty act is that they’re actually quite good. Think Blonde Redhead or an undamaged Tori Amos. They’d be Disney Channel stars tomorrow, if they weren’t already way too hip for that sort of thing. (M.E.)DR. DOG Mercury Lounge, 9 p.m.Philly band Dr. Dog embodies the lack of pretension we’ve come to expect from the City of Brotherly Love. “Easy Beat” (National Parking), their aptly titled debut, charms with its ramshackle, home-recorded sound. So does the easy mix of influences in their songs, which combine Beatles-esque melodies, lazy jam-band rhythms, imperfect Beach Boys harmonies, and country-rock piano and organ. It’s the “Basement Tapes” done by a bunch of musicians who aren’t yet famous, but one day may be. (M.E.)BROTHER ALI Irving Plaza, 11 p.m.ATMOSPHERE Irving Plaza, midnightMinneapolis’s Rhymesayers Entertainment is the small label currently carrying the torch for independent hip-hop, and its acts run the gamut of underground styles. Brother Ali is the precociously talented purist, a young MC with an old soul who favors a simple boom-bap beat to underscore his wordplay-happy storytelling. Sean Daly, aka Slug, the flamboyant mouthpiece of the duo Atmosphere, is the poster man-child for emorap – that unfortunately named combination of indie-rock’s personal bloodletting in lyrics and rap’s infatuation with the boss riff. Slug’s producing partner Ant seems to keep killer hooks in his pocket like spare change. Atmosphere represents the best chance of an underground rap to break into pop success since the early 1990s, but as their sneak song peeks from the new “You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having” album, due in October, reveals, even indie rappers’ sexual politics are still stuck in the 1950s. (B.M.)CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH Mercury Lounge, midnightClap Your Hands Say Yeah promises to be to CMJ 2005 what Arcade Fire was to CMJ 2004: the unsigned band suddenly on everyone’s lips. But the similarities go beyond mere circumstance: CYHSY has the same surrealistic playfulness in their sound. The ecstatic indie press has compared them, alternately, to the Talking Heads, Neutral Milk Hotel, Modest Mouse, and the Velvet Underground, but it adds up to a sound uniquely their own. Come early or don’t come at all. (M.E.)NEED NEW BODY Knitting Factory Tap Bar, 12:20 a.m.Don’t worry if you catch this Philadelphia quintet and have absolutely no idea how to identify it. Chances are Need New Body couldn’t succinctly describe its kitchen-sink hybrid of jazz, folk, rock, funk, and contagious craziness, either. On the new “Where’s Black Ben?” its incessant genrehopping misses the playful mark as often as hits it, but live Need New Body is a runaway train. The bassist constantly lays down chest-thumping throbs. The guitarist and keyboardist toss off meandering, goofy lines as if they just wandered in from a Frank Zappa session. And the drummer’s energy compels everybody to keep up with a frenetic pace. It’s a volatile energy level that could fall to pieces at any moment, but somehow Need New Body manages to sustain its levitating fever – and bring everybody in the room along for the ride. (B.M.)THE GOSSIP Knitting Factory, 12:40 a.m.The Gossip fittingly headlines the Kill Rock Stars showcase tonight. This Arkansas-by-way-of-Olympia trio smelts an impassioned fury that recalls the Northwest label’s halcyon mid-1990s output, when its music and alternative politics were impossible to separate. It does help that the Gossip welds its ideas into thrillingly infectious songs. Drummer Hannah Blilie puts a serious bottom behind guitarist Brace Paine’s herky-jerky grooves, and they combine into a danceable rush that spotlights charismatic vocalist Beth Ditto. This fabulously unskinny frontwoman belts her lyrics with a Tina Turner gale force, and live these three deliver incendiary sets that are hard to top. (B.M.)SUICIDE GIRLS LIVE BURLESQUE Delancey, 1 a.m.The only thing better than discreetly eyeballing sexy, tatted-and-dyed indie-rock girls at a show is going to a show where you get to gawk openly as they perform campy strip routines and smother one another in Ready Whip and chocolate syrup. This fantasy comes true in the Suicide Girls Live Burlesque Show. Somehow or other the geniuses at Suicide-Girls.com have managed to make soft-core porn seem like a form of self expression and pro-feminist statement. And who are we to argue? So go enjoy the show, but make sure your panting, cartoon-wolf impersonation has the appropriate note of irony in it: This is still PC-conscious indie rock, after all. (M.E.)SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17Sub Pop showcase: CHAD VANGAALEN, HOLOPAW, FRUIT BATS, KINSKI, WOLF PARADE, ROGUE WAVE, THE CONSTANTINES Bowery Ballroom, 6 p.m.One of the best ways to navigate the wilds of CMJ is to trust the taste of your favorite labels, and few offer lineups as consistently good as this year’s Sub Pop showcase. For those who’ve lost track of the label since the heady days of grunge, things have changed – a lot. The one-time home to Nirvana and Sunny Day Real Estate can no longer be pinned to a single style or even a region of the country, a point amply demonstrated by their CMJ lineup. Newly signed Chad VanGaalen limns lovely, fractured solo tunes that will drift easily into Holopaw’s eerie and atmospheric pastoral sound. The Fruit Bats play charming (if limited) power pop, while Kinski continues to bash out unrepentant noise rock. Wolf Parade splits the slim difference between Modest Mouse (Isaac Brock produced their EP) and Arcade Fire, while the Constantines bridge the more disparate (or are they?) sources of Fugazi, Springsteen, and the Replacements. This is a show that promises the best of both words: variety and – more important in these circumstances – quality control. (M.E.)KHANATE Hook, 9 p.m.THE PSYCHIC PARAMOUNT Hook, 10 p.m.New York’s Khanate discovered the next level of evil in doom metal by slowing its music’s pulse down to just above brain dead. It’s a idea so simple – heavily distorted guitars and bass pushed to nearly deafening volume levels cause waves of electric hum to pucker the skin even when one string is struck and sustained – that has yielded some of the most unforgiving metal in the contemporary underground (though the idea is starting to sound like a shtick on the new “Capture and Release”). The three fellow New Yorkers in Psychic Paramount operate on a even more basic level: Turn everything up and play as loud, hard, and long as they physically can. It’s a process that has already turned out one stunning heavy-psych head kick – 2005’s “Gamelan into the Mink Supernatural” – and makes for one of the most combustible ear bleeds around onstage. (B.M.)VIVA K Pianos, 12:30 a.m.Not since Romeo Void’s “Benefactor” has one woman’s voice carried an entire album in a perpetual post-coital purr. That is exactly what Ween Callas pulls off on the 2005 self-titled debut of Los Angeles’s Viva K. Musically Viva K is straight-ahead dance-punk – guitars and synths punch at and kiss Killing Joke-esque drum-machine rhythms ideally suited for after-hours rooftop dance parties. Cutting right through the too-cool vibe is Callas’s cooing, the emotional sun around which everything else in Viva K’s songs revolves. (B.M.)THE HOLD STEADY CBGB, midnightThe Hold Steady is just what you’d get if Mickey Rourke’s barfly fronted an indie rock band with Hubert Selby on lead guitar and Charles Bukowski on bass. Singer Craig Finn has a raspy voice reminiscent of Social Distortion’s Mike Ness, and the band’s songs inhabit a similar underworld of skate-culture refuse, where hood rats tattoo themselves with sharpened ballpoint pens between bouts of cheap drugs and cheaper sex. Such bleak tales are matched by clever lyrics and melodic if messy tunes that will be ringing, pleasantly, in your head for days. (M.E.)Where To See ItB.B. King Blues Club237 W. 42nd Street, 212-997-4144www.bbkingblues.comBowery Ballroom6 Delancey Street, 212-533-2111www.boweryballroom.comCBGB315 Bowery Street, 212-982-4052www.cbgb.comDelancey168 Delancey Street, 212-254-9920www.thedelancey.comHook18 Commerce Street, Brooklyn, 718-797-3007www.southernlord.comIrving Plaza17 Irving Place, 212-777-6800www.irvingplaza.comThe Knitting Factory74 Leonard Street, 212-219-3132www.knittingfactory.comMaxwell’s1039 Washington Street, Hoboken, 201-653-1703Mercury Lounge217 East Houston Street, 212-260-4700www.mercuryloungenyc.comNorthsix66 N. 6th Street, Brooklyn, 718-599-5103www.northsix.comPianos158 Ludlow Street, 212-505-3733www.pianosnyc.comScenic25 Avenue B, 212-253-2595www.scenicnyc.comTrash256 Grand Street, Brooklyn, 718-599-1000www.thetrashbar.comWarsaw261 Driggs Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-387-0505www.smoosh.comWebster Hall125 E. 11th Street, 212-353-1600www.websterhall.com

A Map to the Underground

More from the New York Sun

The Trump Administration Takes on Harvard on Antisemitism

A Reconciliation Bill Is the Only Way To Keep Our Military Great and Our Democracy Indestructible

Somaliland, Pro-Western Partially Recognized State on Horn of Africa, Dives Into American Politics With Wild X Account

Birthright Citizenship Before the Nine

The Opportunity in Somaliland

CBS News Announces End to Radio Service After Run of Almost 100 Years

DOJ Sues Harvard Alleging Civil Rights Violations Against Jewish and Israeli Students

The New Museum, Once a Scrappy Cultural Renegade, Matures Into an Artistic Elder Statesman