The Best: Jesu, Blender Theater
Jesu's success, especially with the core metal audience, has been one of the minor miracles of recent times, at least as regards getting kids to pay attention to certain kinds of music they might otherwise overlook with their genre blinkers on. As the band fronted by "the guy from Godflesh," Jesu was always going to have some heft to its tolling riffs, but compared to the pulverizing machine music of Godflesh at its best, Jesu's guitars are, to quote one song title, "weightless and horizontal." Too heavy for shoegaze, too airy for doom, they're not quite metal and definitely not indie rock, one of those hybrids that both fits a trend (the Neurisis school of atmospheric metal) and transcends it (no one's doing the My Bloody Headbanger shtick with as much elan as Justin Broadrick).

So Jesu plays to rooms full of kids in extreme metal T-shirts, but what was the last metal show you were at where the vocalist could comfortably stay at a whisper or a cavernous croon? You definitely had to strain to hear the occasional delicate moments buried in Jesu's big sound, lost in the crummy acoustics of the Blender Theater; a wonky mix didn't help much either. On record, the drums are distant as waves breaking on a shoreline when heard a few blocks away, leaving Broadrick's super-sincere, almost naive melodies to fill up most of the space. Live, however, the drums were the loudest part, the snare like a gunshot puncturing each riff. The bass swallowed the rest, and with the silver mist almost dispersed, the show became more about the inevitability of those riffs, Broadrick banging not only his head but his entire upper body in an exaggerated display of each monster downbeat. A certain softness of touch did occasionally peek through, however, like on the title track from this year's Conqueror, where laptop-triggered loops floated us through Broadrick's most weightless composition yet, definitely making us wish we were horizontal, rather than stuffed into a seat with bad sightlines.

The Worst: Stars Like Fleas, Galapagos
More woosh, tinkle, chime, plink, strum, whine, woosh, clank, chime, tinkle. Still growing like kudzu in basements all over Brooklyn with no sign of abating. Middlebrow indie that mistakes tiny gestures like scraping intently (but gently!) at your instruments for a brave reinvention of rock, when it's really just being unable to write a goddamn song with a verse-chorus-verse that might actually thrill those outside of your immediate peer group who call Animal Collective a "pop" band with a poker face. So tap the tip of your drumstick in a concentric circle around a cymbal and blow a conch shell and moan a few lines of inscrutable lyrics and plunk out a half-assed intimation of a backbeat and call it "indescribable" and wait for the hype cycle to catch you in its undertow.

Jesu may not be blessed with Tin Pan Alley appeal, but their grandeur and physiciality, however well-worn or even childlike, is definitely a reprieve from this avalanche of mimsy art-indie. I mentioned this briefly in the daily round up, but it bears repeating: Why doesn't anyone call people out for this stuff? You can boo! You can heckle! It's your duty as an American and a music fan to shame bands until they get their act together and shut you up, or until they quit entirely. Sure it makes you look like an asshole, but tough love isn't about being liked. And the unchecked and unregulated "experimental" end of indie rock needs an intervention wicked bad.

The Best

Mika Miko
First saw this L.A. retro-punk fivesome last year, and while they're no more technically accomplished than they were 12 months ago, they now play with an tour-tested assurance that doesn't compromise their offhand, giggly stage presence. I'd have to guess that not one of these ladies is over 23, and while they might be the most adorable band around at the moment, they're also one of the fiercest. And sloppiest, but of course, like all the shambling, circa-'77 first wave punk bands (less Slits, more deadbeat L.A. skronk) they draw influence from, sloppiness is the high ideal. One singer jogs in place like an extra in Hairspray as she (literally) shouts into her phone, while the other has the slightly uptight air of a matronly secretary circa 1974 as she lurches about in her rayon blouse and skirt, one time switching to saxophone for the full Lora Logic. While I appreciate the spunk and spark, I do wish they had better/more memorable hooks—what's always elevated one set of three-chorders above another when it's hard to otherwise differentiate along lines of comptence or prettiness or rhythm—to go along with the pitch-perfect presentation. All-female punk bands are something that we can never have enough of, but the addition of something memorable to hum when you're not watching them laugh and thrash on stage would definitely put them over the top.

Yeasayer
My notes make them sound bizarre-unto-terrible: Emo(tive) rockers play extended hippie jams (a great guitarist who knows that spacey solos are best with a minimum of notes) with aquatic keyboards and up-to-date electro-beats that (musically, at least) comes off like the intersection of IDM (don't let anyone tell you they're aping hip-hop), the Pure Prairie League, and mid-period Talk Talk. Plus (actually capable) three part harmonies that root them directly in modern Brooklyn (the long shadow of Tunde and crew) but also dig into the kind of '70s soft-rock that no respecting indie rocker would cop to keeping in the back of their closet a few years back. Sounds awkward and precious, right? Sure, sometimes your inner punk felt like you were watching the hipster dirtbag Yes, with the benefit of a smaller stage setup thanks to modern technology. But somtimes, as on the single "2080" and the final song, where their occasionally too-ethereal rock finally achieved concrete heaviness, it was sublime, doing interesting things with stuff that normally has me screaming for the door—folk gentility, prog ornament, 80s art-rock, pencil moustaches.

As for the worst band of the day, well, you'll have to wait until Monday when the special extended remix rant is set to drop.

The Best
Jay Reatard at the Mercury Lounge
This Tennessee kid is no longer a kid and has long been far from an orthodox punk. But live, he still plays like a teenager's fantasy of what the ultimate punk show should sound like: fast, short, and with even less bullshit between songs than the Ramones. Reatard's current sound (under his own name at least) is early British punk played as raw as '60s garage and sometimes as fast as hardcore, and on stage, the "insects in an Altoids tin" production and slight Anglophilic tinge in the vocals on his awesome solo album Blood Visions get smashed into a 1-2-3-4! roar of unison headbanging and sawn-off guitar leads. (No solos, thank you.) Best set of CMJ after Ponytail, for those keeping up.

Yo Majesty
Not sure why everyone pegs these Florida ladies as "alternative" when their beats are more concerned with moving asses than foregrounding their quirks and their "fuck you" shouts could be right off a gritty underground hip-hop mixtape. (Except for the fact that they advertise themselves as such on their MySpace page or get extra dap from indie rock blogs for being sexually explicit femme rappers, which is perhaps some kind of novelty compared to all the sexually explicit male rappers on the radio or for anyone who's never heard "How Many Licks." Or maybe it was the Daft Punk sample.) Still, all the coverage is earned and explicable because the combination—fleet rhymes, growling party chants, casual nudity, and beats that would make Luke Skyywalker's heart swell with pride—actually works a treat at loosening up stiff indie rock audiences. Plus they even managed to sneak a conscious plea in at the end without coming off forced after all that masturbation talk.

Cut Off Your Hands
On record there's the worry these guys would come off like a slightly pissier Bloc Party, the recording studio smoothing out the kinks in their knotty and noisy Brit-punk. Live, they earned their "almost unknown New Zealand band plays eight bazillion CMJ shows" hype stripes by somehow not flagging after four or five gigs, and while the lead singer has copped everyone else's flailing stage moves (Iggy, Ian Curtis, Guy from Fugazi), his spazz didn't feel forced. Bonus points for having one of those "everything shaved except for a mop on top" haircuts I haven't seen since the high days of industrial.

The Worst
Trail Of Dead at Highline Ballroom
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I'm inherently suspicious of any band with more than five members on stage. In a non-jazz, non-Allmans/Skynyrd, non-ska context, what this usually means is leaden "epic" rock that thinks a big stinking crescendo (with or without pained, emotive shouting) should make you preemptively wet your pants with catharsis. With two keyboardists, two guitarists, and a drummer who had the full arsenal of twirling-his-sticks moves down pat, you could figure out where each of Trail of Dead's songs were going from the hushed, shimmering open chords—i.e. the exact same boring place each time, i.e. to the heartswelling (and loud) dramatic moment where boyfriend and girlfriend grip each other's sweaty hands just a little tighter. Having not seen them for several years, I'm unsure of when they molted into such a maudlin Big Rock spectacle, but they should definitely see about getting in on some of that Friday Night Lights soundtrack love Explosions In The Sky has been milking.

The Best: Ponytail, Bowery Ballyroom
We raved about Baltimore four-piece Ponytail almost a year ago, and our description from back then still holds true: "They've got thick, sheeny guitars that burst into flurries of top-speed riffing, but vocalist Molly Siegel's post-verbal outbursts, which recall animals from all over the Wild Kingdom, are what really sends this record over the edge for us." What's changed is that the band's gotten so much better. The bubblegum Boredoms—Deerhoof is the other popular point of comparison—Ponytail play technically adroit art-punk (absolutely sick drumming from Jeremy Hyman) at whiplash tempos, with duelling guitars from Ken Seeno and Dustin Wong that recall surf rock as often as speed metal as often as no wave, songs that manage to make all sorts of crazed dynamics and prog-rock flourishes feel as catchy as the Buzzcocks. How's that for real-deal rock critic type talk?

Still, there's plenty of "jagged" art school rock clogging the MP3 blog arteries right now, and it's still Siegel, "singing" words that might as well be baby talk with a terrifying intensity, that pushes Ponytail to "holy fuck." Tiny and good humored—"thanks!" she chirped with a smile between each number—but utterly possessed once the band kicks into a song, Siegel sreeched and stomped the stage, jutted her hips as she rolled her eyes back in her head and cried like a newborn bird, grinned in pleasure (or pain) as she growled like Cookie Monster, let out rainforest noises, scatted like the ladies of Kleenex, and copped a vocal lick from Stevie Nicks' "Edge Of Seventeen." It was, as Maura said, "like an entire band built around the concept of the female orgasm." Sadly, the songs on the MySpace page only hint at their evolution over the last 12 months—they played all new material last night, written for a possible second album on Monitor Records due in 2008, and if they get into a studio with a sympathetic producer it's going shame any other band making a similar racket—but leave your bunker if they come to your burg and give them a little of your money. This is the one band where we won't get pissy in six months if they end up hyped to no end. They deserve it.

Ponytail [Official MySpace]

The Worst: Cobra Starship, Don Hill's
Maybe it was just the fact that they had to follow the amazing Pack—the teenaged Bay Area hyphy crew that briefly made slip-on Vans the hottest bargain footwear in hip-hop history—who left the stage to "Baba O'Reily" after managing miracles with just two-note synth basslines, a few fingersnaps, and four guys shouting in unison. But from their turgid "anthemic" alt-pop to their smug singer copping b-boy moves that should have shamed even the most shameless White Rapper Show contestant, New York's Cobra Starship was a sign that it's probably time to put mall emo out with the recycling next week. Even the other sub-par stuff we caught yesterday—the cruddy, muddy Celtic folk-punk band (O'Death) where you couldn't even hear their fiddle over the nasal screech of the vocalist, or the embarassingly winsome and earnest singer-songwriter (Peasant) with the stage presence of an old lady staring down an oncoming big rig—didn't stoop to (ironically? unironically? does it fucking matter?) rocking out on a keytar.

[Photo: Frank Hamilton]

The Best: Alter Bridge and Another Animal, Fillmore NY at Irving Plaza
Have you opened your eyes to the glory and power of Jesus Christ while still being enough of a bad ass to throw the devil horns? Do you want to enjoy the vibe of a South Jersey strip club (or fundamentalist revival meeting) without boarding New Jersey Transit? Are you looking to go to a CMJ showcase where the crowd is actually psyched to be there, rather than desultorily tapping notes into a Blackberry? Where they're moved by the music, even? Then on Tuesday night, you had to go to what everyone agreed was the "least CMJ" show of the week.

Another Animal provided the musical highlight of the day, despite being Godsmack fronted by the lead shrieker from Ugly Kid Joe. (No, really.) Singer Whitfield Crane could now be mistaken for Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath with a debilitating binge-eating problem, and perhaps it was his bulk that forced him to keep slumping onto a stool, sometimes while still in the middle of a song; at one point he stumbled offstage entirely so that the elderly Sid Vicious lookalike behind the drums could take the mic for an frantic old-school punk tune, easily the best song when surrounded by so much sludge. But other times Crane danced with a fat mime's grace or the jerking motions of a mook Ian Curtis letting out Blueshammer yowls.

And yet despite the members having the weather-beaten look of the true alt-rock survivor—the look of Lanye Staley's corpse, essentially—Another Animal were enjoying running through their hard-rock cliches, stumbling through their hackwork with a garage band's glee. Containing all the essential non-Stapp members of Creed, Alter Bridge's hard-bitten competence was actually kind of a letdown after Another Animal's sloppiness, which at least had charm. The handful of ladies in the audience dutifully swooned as lead singer Mark TremontiMyles Kennedy leaned over the monitors to exhort us to follow him to into the kingdom of heaven, despite the fact that he (at best) resembles a shaggy Crispin Glover or a fetus with Jeff Buckley's haircut.

The thing about Alter Bridge's particular style of buttrock is that what's coming off the stage is contrived as hell, gleaned from a life spent watching Poison videos and TV preachers, but the audience's reaction is genuine as hell, guys in muscle shirts doing the Celine Dion fist-to-chest-to-air move at the climactic moments. So if you relax a little, it's easy while watching to get all affectionate for all the wrong reasons. Then you remember this is tuneless God-squad grunge without a single decent chorus that doesn't involve a thinly disguised resurrection metaphor, and you're actually longing for the hooks of a band made up of ex-members of Godsmack. Still, it was easily friendlier and more sanitary than the other major event of the evening.

The Worst: Dan Deacon et al., the Silent Barn
To get to the Silent Barn you have to take the L train deep into the part of Brooklyn where Sparks flows and all home furnishings are neon, where American Apparel is formalwear and unicorns are a food group, where it's humid enough to fog your glasses or muss your hair the minute you step inside of a cheek-to-jowl punk house to find a skinny white kid hyping a crowd, a crowd even whiter than the Alter Bridge show, by "rapping" over what sounds like an old Crystal Waters record.

This is Juiceboxxx (at least this is what I was informed) and his routine is pretending to be Freedom Williams over canned dance tracks. This is the kind of thing that gives current indie rock a bad name, the underground at its least essential and most embarassing, what amounts to karaoke, tinny synthesizers, and someone who's just way too earnest about pumping up the jam. But the audience lapped it up, and when Juiceboxx ceded the floor to the DJ, everyone danced to songs that were pop hits when they had barely mastered holding their urine. (And, of course, that damned Simian Mobile Disco remix of Rick Ross.) As you perched on a ratty couch like it was a toilet in Grand Central and tried to keep the sweat out of your eyes, Team Robespierre's scratchy electro-punk—from the let's-fall-all-over-each-other school—barely registered anything other than background noise to heat exhaustion.

The reason I was at the Silent Barn was Dan Deacon, of whom I am a fan, which I know puts me in the minority here. But his live shows—once a sure bet, the kind of value-for-your-money guarantee that was enough to make you brave leaving the house—have become intolerable in the last year. Not through any fault on Deacon's part, who's still as entertaining as ever when he's able to defend his equipment from drunken 18-year-olds, but before he had even finished soundcheck, the stink of art school sex (think ass and dirty Vans), the pain of squashed toes, and the annoyance of smashed ribs had become unbearable. I still think these kids (well, some of them) are making some of the most exciting music around at the moment, but squeezing any enjoyment of the gigs has become almost impossible, unless you're too fucked up to care about getting beer poured down your back when someone gets too excited because "O.P.P." just came on.