Idolator

Each day at CMJ we'll be taking an in-depth look at the best (and worst) shows we happened upon. On day one, we gave into the power of Christian grunge and probably contracted some sort of skin disease from the couches at a Brooklyn house party in search of underground thrills.

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.