The new Beach House album, Teen Dream, out on Jan. 26.

Local electro-retro-futurist Outputmessage dropped a four-song single yesterday, the third and final one leading to his upcoming album. You can pay what you want for it over at his bandcamp page, or stream it:

Teen Dream, the upcoming Sub Pop debut of the dreamy Baltimore duo Beach House, has leaked, and Gorilla vs. Bear has an mp3 of one of its songs, “Norway.” It’s less minimal, and a bit poppier, than the group’s usual fare, but just as gauzy and hypnotic. Not just one blog has described this as “gorgeous.” Right on.

The hazy Swedish electropop act Little Dragon performs Sunday at Liv, and the Couch Sessions blog  dropped a mixtape that pays tribute to the group’s singer, Yumini Nagano, by connecting the dots between her various projects, all of which are, by degrees, jazzy and urbane. D.C.’s Supa Kool DJ Uncle Q mans the boards. Grab it here.

A few weeks old: Casper Bangs has a new EP of lush, romantic guitar pop that you can buy for any price (including $0) from his bandcamp page, as well as a new white-vinyl seven-inch, which you can buy from Dischord for $5. Or listen to the songs here:

You can get a small sense of how that sound emerged at Hugh McElroy’s Ruffian Records Web site, which recently posted some free MP3s from two of McElroy’s pre-Black Eyes projects, A.K.A. Harlot #1 and Exaspirin, as well as a 1996 session McElroy engineered for New York art punk outfit the Vestpocket Psalm. While you’re there, you can also grab (for free) every song that Horses—McElroy’s 2004 band with Black Eyes members Dan Caldas and Mike Kanin—ever recorded, as well as Hume’s Wyfe EP.

Ruffian also announced a pair of upcoming joint releases with Sockets Records: Phosphenes, the debut full-length by aggro post-rockers Imperial China, and a compilation LP featuring local bands. In an e-mail, McElroy wrote that the labels are hoping to release the compilation in the spring.

If folk music’s prime currency is authenticity, Langhorne Slim might well earn some crooked eyebrows. Classically trained at the SUNY-Purchase conservatory, Sean Scolnik donned loafers and floppy hat and named himself after his hometown in the tradition of all those rail-hoppin’ ramblers who used to do that. The blogosphere gobbled up this aesthetic and and have cast Slim in the role of Guthrie-Dylan inheritor he came dressed to play.

Really, Slim doesn’t make music like that at all. His music is much more poptimistic, with an evangelical energy that has led some critics to call his music religious (and not in the way Bob Dylan equated Woody Guthrie’s music with religion). Slim’s lyrics lunge, albeit passionately, with a blade that is shinier than it is sharp. Cat Stevens, with his spiritual conceit, is an apter analog—or the Avett Brothers, with whom Slim has toured.

The irony, of course, is that once Langhorne Slim is amputated from the Guthrie-Dylan continuum the question of authenticity ceases to pose a problem, and we can appreciate Scolnik for what he is: An upbeat kid with a folk-gospel bent who makes dynamic, non-threatening, thoroughly enjoyable pop music.

Langhorne Slim plays tonight at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel with Dawes, left-coast country rock act whom Rolling Stone last week certified as “breaking,” and who occasionally go Steinbeck all over their blog. Doors at 8 p.m.; $12-$14.

The Aislers Set

Slumberland Records, the locally formed label that has released some of the best, noisiest indie pop ever pressed to seven-inch, turned 20 this year, and it’s celebrating all weekend. Tonight’s show at the Black Cat features current Slumberland bands Crystal Stilts, Brown Recluse, Frankie and the Outs and Pants Yell!, as well as three reunited bands from the area, the Ropers, Lorelei, and Nord Express.

We asked some of the people involved with Slumberland over the years to share their favorite memories of the label. We ran some yesterday, and here are the rest:

On professional jealousy: “The one record that I wish I had been a part of but wasn’t was Black Tambourine. I am forever jealous of everyone in that band because those songs are absolutely perfect. When I first heard “Throw Aggi Off the Bridge,” I was filled with anger that it was something I hadn’t done. It represented what we were all about. It was noisy, it had the Wall of Sound, and it hinted at ’60s girl groups. It had that element of what anyone could do and no one had.”—Kelly Young (Velocity Girl)

On bonding over chipped beef: “My first encounter with Slumberland was in 1990. I went to see Whorl open for the Wedding Present at the old 9:30 Club. I distinctly recall Brian Nelson screaming until the shade of his face matched the red lights they were performing under. The stage was like the bridge of a submarine that is rapidly sinking. It was insanely loud and pummeling. I tracked down Mike Schulman after the show and demanded an interview. I met Mike and Dan Searing at the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring and interviewed them for the GW Hatchet. They told me about music like John Cage, Glenn Branca, and Skullflower. My article apparently failed to capture and convey what I had witnessed as Whorl’s fan base did not explode in the way that I had imagined. But, I made friends for life over coffee and chipped beef.”—Matthew Dingee (Lorelei)

On hazing: “Dan Searing and I went to meet John Cage at a book signing in Adams Morgan [around 1991], and then to a concert of his work downtown. I don’t remember what we saw but I do remember mixing pills and drink. We did our best to focus but, like the composer himself, we nodded off a few times during the performance. We ended up where we usually did, back at Mike [Schulman]’s garden apartment listening to records at full crank. Pam [Berry] was over practicing some Bright Colored Lights songs with Mike. I eventually passed out on the floor. Much to my surprise, when I got home the next day I noticed that Pam had drawn eyes on my eyelids. I’ll be looking to propagate this hazing ritual onto any member of the new crop of Slumberland bands that happens to pass out this weekend.”—Matthew Dingee

On soul-induced nudity: “We had sort of a Slumberland supergroup with members of the Lilys, and the Ropers and Lorelei, and it was I think the 10th anniversary of the old 9:30 Club, maybe the 15th, and we were doing a cover of Archie Bell and the Drells’ ‘Tighten Up,’ which is a great soul classic, and Lorelei’s guitarist at the time [Dave Cerf], who was in the original lineup and who was back in town, who knows how or why, but he took off all his clothes and became a naked male dancer for this song, at a sold-out 9:30 club.”—Stephen Gardner (Lorelei)

On surviving a blizzard: “I think it was October 1994, and Boyracer and the Ropers were on an American tour. Papa Slumber (Mike Schulman) and a German fellow named Ulrich were shepherding a caravan of sleepy musicians through a northern snowy mountain pass in two vans. Blizzard conditions…and I think we were supposed to be in Seattle the next day. Our vehicles were built for East Coast winters and wet city slop. They never should have seen West Coast mountains like these, not to mention this kind of snow. The heat was on full blast but still not enough to keep out that cold. Mike was driving one van, and Ulrich was driving the other. I could feel ours fishtailing back and forth at every turn. I was drifting in and out of consciousness from sleep deprivation but to actually fall asleep felt like certain death, so no one really slept. I can’t imagine how we got through…Really, I was so frazzled, I can’t even remember. It was something else…like Washington crossing the Delaware. Like this label…how did Mike do it? How did this label come out the other side of that mountain range with everything in tact? He kept it together. 20 years…amazing.”—Greg Pavlovcak (the Ropers)

On touring Japan with the Aislers Set in 1999: “Amy [Linton] was being chased down the street for her autograph, like the Beatles or something.  We did a big show in Tokyo at the end of the tour, and the album wasn’t out in Japan yet but every single kid knew every word to every song. The whole crowd just went nuts from the first guitar chord. It was kind of shocking. Even I signed an autograph.”—Mike Schulman, label head

On channeling influences: “One time Peggy [Wang-East] and I were out at an indie-pop dance night in New York called Mondo. All of a sudden, the opening chords of ‘I Love You Like the Way that I Used to Do’ by Rocketship came on, or so I thought. I said, ‘Peggy, they’re playing Rocketship, this rules—let’s dance.’ And she responded by pointing out that the song was actually ‘This Love Is Fucking Right’—by us.”—Kip Berman (the Pains of Being Pure at Heart)

To judge by their tightly wound, country-tinged pop songs, Olivia Mancini and the Mates aren’t shorting their craft. But even the most polished band needs its R&R, and this local act—featuring two former members of Washington Social Club—loves to curl up with a good book. That’s the impression, at least, left by “Graphology,” a rollicking gem from the group’s new album in which Mancini lists maybe a dozen book titles. Apparently, her bookshelf (including 50 Years of Fender, 1776, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles) is pretty heavy on nonfiction, although some Dashiell Hammett sneaks in (noir does not make its way, it only sneaks). Pretty eclectic stuff: too bad, then, that Mancini concludes each verse with “those are not enough to make me smart.” But we’ve all been there.

Olivia Mancini and the Mates perform tomorrow at the Black Cat with Stripmall Ballads. $8. You can download “Graphology” at the group’s Web site. Here’s another song:

More literary pop songs after the jump, including a nonsensical (what else!) Pynchon tribute, a lucrative (?!) Brontë homage, and Dan Bejar being Dan Bejar!

“Gravity’s Rainbow” by Klaxons (2007): This ravey U.K. lad band named a song on its 2007 album, Myths of the Future, after Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 postmodern masterpiece, although the lyrics (something about Tangier deserts and the year 4000) share little with the namesake, save denseness. No clue if Pynchon would approve, but the song is probably a lot better than Laurie Anderson’s proposed (and rejected) Gravity Rainbow opera would have been:

“California Zephyr” by Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar (2009): This rose-tinted cut leads off One Fast Move or I’m Gone, an album inspired by Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur. Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Farrar’s (Son Volt) lyrics draw from Kerouac’s prose, and the two more or less match their vocal styles (earnest and weather-worn, respectively) to the book’s opposing tones (romantic and nightmarish).

“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush (2008): The first single by the fey, experimental pop singer, which in 1978 made her, at 19 even, the first woman to both record and write a No. 1 single in the U.K. (This after her label wanted to introduce the singer with a safer song, but relented. Go lit!) She penned the song after watching a movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s tragic novel, which has bedeviled AP Language classes ever since its 1846 publication (OK, it took a few years for it to enter curricula). As weird as it is, the song is pretty restrained for Bush, who continues to make great, challenging music but is utterly to blame for nonsensical ’80s videos like Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

“Your Blood” by Destroyer: Dan Bejar mentions a couple of Albert Camus novels in this cut from his excellent Rubies album. This being Destroyer, though, there is ostensibly no logic as to why.

Few independent record labels make it to 20 years, and even fewer can claim the influence of Slumberland. Founded in 1989 by members of Black Tambourine, Velocity Girl, Whorl, and Powderburns, the label blended noise rock and shoegaze with melodic, underground guitar pop, laying the brickwork for what’s proved to be an enduring indie-pop aesthetic. Slumberland was initially based out of a house and record store in Silver Spring, and although the label’s head, Mike Schulman,  moved to California in 1992, he continued to provide a showcase for great D.C. bands—like Lilys, the Ropers, and Lorelei—and, well, great bands, like the Aislers Set, Boyracer, Small Factor, Rocketship and many others. The current roster includes popular acts like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Crystal Stilts.

The label celebrates its 20th anniversary this weekend with shows at the Black Cat and in New York, which is as good an occasion for nostalgia as any. City Paper asked some of the people involved with Slumberland over the years to share their favorite memories. Today and tomorrow, read what they had to say.

On the first Slumberland release, 1989’s “What Kind of Heaven Do You Want?” compilation: “We had recorded the songs … on four-track cassette in the basement [of the Slumberland house], and we needed to send a DAT to the pressing plant. We had no real concept of mixdown; we just thought we needed to get the songs from four-track to cassette.  So we found this classified ad for a guy with a home studio in Rockville who called himself ‘Bebop.’  We took the four-track machine (with marks on the faders for each song), and played them for Bebop. He was listening to our poorly recorded, noisy, murky psychedelic songs, and had absolutely no idea what to make of any of it. He kinda scrunched up his face and said that the Black Tambourine and Velocity Girl tracks were ‘kinda like’ Pink Floyd. We had him add a little bit of reverb, and he suggested a bit of chorus on the guitar for the Black Tambourine song, to give it more of that taste of Floyd.”—Archie Moore (Black Tambourine/Velocity Girl/The Saturday People).

On recording the 1989 Powderburns seven-inch: “Mike [Schulman] and I lived in the same house and had both dropped out of [University of] Maryland. One weekend we decided we were gonna make a record, and called a recording engineer. We just got it in our head that this guy Wharton Tiers had recorded all these noise bands we liked. So we went up [to New York], brought a case of beer to the studio, and ripped through the songs.”—Kelly Young (Velocity Girl).

On making the first Black Tambourine single even louder: “I have fond memories of recording Black Tambourine’s first seven-inch at Barret Jones’ studio, somewhere in Virginia at the time. We were playing back one song which was already wrapped up in two or three tracks of Mike’s trademark feedback/fuzz guitar. Mike’s analysis: ‘It sounds pretty good, but I think it could use some more guitar.’ Barrett just rolled his eyes and head back, but squeezed in another guitar track we did.”—Brian Nelson (Black Tambourine/Whorl/Velocity Girl), currently a network administrator at City Paper.

On stuffing record sleeves at Vinyl Ink in Silver Spring: “The Black Tambourine seven-inch had two sleeves. I always liked the limited circus tiger sleeve, with glow-in-the-dark ink added by hand. I recall Pam Berry not liking the circus tiger, called it depressing (the drizzling fountain/rain drops on the other sleeve were more her cup of cheer), but she was outvoted.” —Brian Nelson.

On Black Tambourine gigs at Abi’s Restaurant in College Park: “Why did we play there? It was fun, but why? More importantly, why did I think it would be a good idea to invite my parents to experience the squall when they were such fans of my brother’s WHFS-hits cover band? ‘We couldn’t hear the words!’ ‘I know, that’s the way we like it.’ ‘But we couldn’t make out anything you were singing!’—Pam Berry (Black Tambourine).

On Kurt Heasley, and hearing Lilys for the first time: “There was this kid we knew as Wally who worked at a D.C. club called the BBQ Iguana.  He was kind of strange and goofy, speaking in short monologues that followed his own internal logic. … During a cookout at the house where I lived with Pam Berry, Dan Searing, and a few other college friends, Mike Schulman pulled out a cassette that he told me had been given to him by Wally, with ‘Lilys’ on the label. I asked him if it was any good. ‘Nah, it’s terrible,’ Mike replied with a smile. ‘But you have to hear it anyway.’  So he played the cassette, and the whole time it played I thought, ‘Um, this sounds pretty fucking amazing to me. Mike’s tastes are impossible to predict.’  It reminded me a lot of Dinosaur Jr. and Ride, but with an interesting circular guitar figure throughout. Finally, I told Mike, ‘I don’t think that sounded too bad at all. I kinda liked it actually.’  Mike laughed at me and practically yelled something along the lines of ‘It’s pretty fantastic, isn’t it?! Can you believe it?’”—Archie Moore

On drinking after a game of golf, and discussing the first Ropers single: “[Kelly Young and Jim Spellman and I] were sitting around having a drink up in Friendship Heights somewhere, and I remember talking about that first Ropers single and how much I liked it, except that the production on it “wasn’t particularly good.” Jim piped up immediately and said “I know, I did that.” It was his first effort at engineering. I would’ve felt worse about it had he not so readily agreed with me.”—Mark Williams, an old friend of the label, who runs the Soundclash dance night.

On creating art for a Swirlies seven-inch: “We did a limited edition sleeve for the mail orders, and I had this idea: ‘Oh Swirlies, I’ll do spin art, like that carnival kind of thing. And I bought a spin-art kit which was 7 1/2 by 7 1/2, and I was like, ‘Oh, records are 7 by 7 inches, I’ll be fine,’ not thinking that if you spin a square in a circle, the circumference of the circle is bigger than the square. It wouldn’t spin, so I took a knife and cut the edges off, thinking I was being really clever, and not thinking that the edges are what keep the paint from flying all over the place. And I did it at this place I was renting, this pretty nice house in Adams Morgan. So I got it all set up and Kelly from Velocity Girl came over, we drank a bunch of beers and then we were like, ‘let’s do it.’ So we put one down in the spin-art thing and threw a bunch of paint on it and that shit flied everywhere. Just everywhere.”—Mike Schulman (Black Tambourine, label head).

On the unusual origins of Chickfactor’s name: “I did an interview while I was in Lorelei about the Slumberland scene, and I was unaware of what the process of interviews are like. And I ended up just reciting lots of unfortunate things which a 16-year-old kid might say. One was talking about this name that had developed in the band for bands that were popular, obviously for their music but notably for an attractive singer or band member. We had called it, depending on the female or male variant, ‘chick factor’ or ‘dick factor.’ And so I talked about how Velocity Girl, who at the time were basically the stars of Slumberland, were benefiting from this fact, and that there were a lot of other great Slumberland bands that were not getting attention. … It was sort of an unfortunate thing, but lo and behold, everyone sorta laughed about it, and they [Black Tambourine's Pam Berry and others] started this zine called Chickfactor.”—Stephen Gardner (Lorelei/Chessie).

On the early recording “Ode to Lenny Bias”: “This would have been in the summer of 1986 and, at least in my opinion, gave birth to what would become Slumberland Records. Slumberland was certainly born of the mid-to-late ’80s scene at the University of Maryland-College Park campus, where Mike [Schulman] and I shared a dorm, and where Len Bias was king of basketball.

“Len Bias was significant to us because he seemed to be everything we were not: a star athlete—indeed the Boston Celtics had just announced him as their No. 2 pick—and a larger-than-life personality on campus. Shockingly, Len Bias, who seemed to have everything going for him, lost his life to a cocaine overdose just days after being selected by the champion Celtics.

“Mike and I had a shared taste in music. Actually, he introduced me to many great bands and I adopted his taste. It didn’t take long for us to make a go at our own brand of noise.  The night we recorded ‘Ode…’ I stole my mother’s cheap classical acoustic guitar and we rendezvoused at Mike’s parent’s house to try our hand at recording. We were armed with Dr. Peppers, Utz Crab Chips and inspired by Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising. We didn’t really have any other instruments, cords, or skills but Mike had figured out that if you plug headphones into the recording jack on a stereo tape deck, the headphones turned into a microphone! We set the guitar on the living room floor, tapped it with the headphones, and proceeded to beat on the strings, sometimes violently sometimes softly, for about 10 minutes. The result was dark, noisy, and complete with unintentional feedback; what with the recent tragic passing of Len Bias on our minds, it seemed a fitting homage.”—Robert Goldrick (Whorl).

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn’t take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band’s long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick’s “The Mountain Tapes.” And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take “Grow,” which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the “Be My Baby” beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family’s breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Dandelion Gum by Black Moth Super Rainbow (2007): The members of this blissed-out post-rock band cloak their identities with costumes, pseudonyms, and video-heavy performances, hoping to emphasize their music by de-emphasizing the personalities making it. As the group has acknowledged, this strategy of willful obscurity hasn’t exactly worked out. No kidding: When you record your breakthrough record in a Western Pennsylvania cabin and sing trippy, hypnotic songs about witches, you’re more or less asking to be typecast as backwoods Svengalis.

American Recordings by Johnny Cash (2004): The cabin that the late Johnny and June Carter Cash built in Hendersonville, Tenn., in the late ’70s is definitely that, rustic patina and all. But in the early ’90s, when Johnny began collaborating with producer Rick Rubin for a tetralogy of morose, mostly acoustic albums, the space became a full-fledged studio, which is now run by Johnny and June’s son, John Carter Cash. You can’t find a knobsman more pro than Rubin, but in this case, he simply captured Johnny singing and strumming in his living room. How the Man in Black then wound up with this terrifying Anton Corbijn video, I can’t quite say:

Cabin in the Woods by Retsin (2001): The name says it all. Tara Jane O’Neil and Cynthia Nelson met in the early ’90s when their bands, Rodan and Ruby Falls, shared a tour, and they soon became romantic partners and musical collaborators. The final Retsin album, made more or less in isolation in upstate New York, is dusty and acoustic, drawing as deeply from the well of American folk music as the ’90s indie-folk milieu. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retsin contributed to a Jandek tribute compilation around the same time.

Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Ginger Brooks Takahashi (2003): This between-album project found the Olympia, Wash., singer Mirah retreating for a month to the Blue Ridge Mountains with an eight-track and some fellow musicians. There, she recorded some playful ditties—more washboard band than precise, lo-fi folk—and found sounds. And then she laid down this brassy jam, which recounts, doo-wop refrain in tow, the month-long experience:

Image courtesy of the Cash Cabin Studio MySpace page.

Spelling for Bees refers to itself as both a collective—in that it’s an umbrella for music by its 40 members—and a supergroup, meaning that its participants, drawn from indie-rock bands the District over, occasionally create songs together. The two cuts on the project’s MySpace page, “Love at First Sight” and “Giboullee (Bella),” are delicate and slow-building with an orchestral flair, and the group’s leader, Mittenfields member Dave Mann, says he eventually hopes to incorporate every player, Polyphonic Spree-style, into the live set. Mann formed Spelling for Bees this March with members of Mittenfields and another of his projects, Sweet Tea Pumpkin Pie, as well as Dangerosa, We Were Pirates, the Mean Ideas, Sun Committee, and others (one member, Austen Brown, used to be a singer in the Spree). The group has a residency at the Velvet Lounge, and each month’s performance resembles an open mic centered on a theme; at the show this Tuesday, every member will cover a Radiohead song. The Charlottesville, Va., band Invisible Hands opens, and doors are at 7 p.m. $5.

More overstaffed bands after the jump: cute orchestral indie, a Canadian choir, and Thin Lizzy and the Sex Pistols getting festive!

Emanuel and the Fear (2007-present): This Brooklyn outfit has 11 members and, to date, a five-song EP. Although the band cites Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Philip Glass as inspirations, mostly it concocts cutesy, heart-on-its-sleeve indie pop that places the onus for emotional gravitas entirely on its orchestral component.

I’m From Barcelona (2005-present): If Karen O had demurred, this 29-member Swedish band—whose songs revel in an almost fetishistically adorable vision of childhood—could have easily soundtracked Where The Wild Things Are. In the small world of raucous campfire pop, I’m From Barcelona is the tight, twee ying to Animal Collective’s messy, abstract yang.

The Choir Practice (2006-present): This Vancouver group has one 11-song album and a roster that fluctuates between 11 and 15 members, and it sports what has to be the most spot-on name since The Band. Its members have ties to the, erm, brightest stars of British Columbia—like the New Pornographers, Destroyer, and P:ano—but the Choir Practice’s reference points aren’t eccentric indie bands. Rather, with its many voices and sparse instrumentation, the group comes off as a stripped-down update of harmony-happy late-’60s groups like the Free Design and the Mamas & the Papas.

The Greedies (1978-1979): When the big-riff Irish band Thin Lizzy discovered punk rock, all it came away with was … Christmas? The Greedies featured half of Thiny Lizzy, the quiet half of the Sex Pistols, and recorded only two songs, the single “A Christmas Jingle” and its B-side—you guessed it—”A Christmas Jangle.” Words cannot do it justice:

Salome, one of the few metal bands that performed at this year’s CMJ.

For D.C. bands, the takeaway from CMJ seems to have been this: It will not pluck you from obscurity, but it can’t hurt. Also: Don’t believe the hype.

“The myth that you can land the perfect agent or manager at a place like that—I don’t think it pays attention to the reality that you’ve been talking to that person for seven months already,” said Jesse Elliott, whose polymathic alt-country band These United States played a handful of shows during this year’s College Music Journal Music Marathon. The annual industry gathering featured over 1,000 artists, close to 100 venues, and around a dozen acts from the D.C. area.

Elliott’s got a point: Most of the young bands I heard chatter about during the festival—like Florida’s Surfer Blood, New York’s Freelance Whales, and London’s Golden Silvers and Mumford and Sons—had recording contracts, significant blog buzz, or both going in, not to mention full management teams in place. These are not bands whose success lives or dies according to an industry festival.

“Most of the bands at these festivals are already signed,” wrote Todd Hyman, who runs the District-based labels Carpark and Paw Tracks and hosted CMJ showcases for both, in an e-mail. “Though this year there seemed to be a preponderance of unsigned blog bands. Seems folks were complaining about that.”

Like many of the D.C. bands who played the festival, Hyman questioned CMJ’s usefulness. “CMJ used to be really influential 15-20 years ago,” he wrote. “College radio’s influence has waned with the rise of the Internet. [Austin's South by Southwest] seems to be the main festival these days. I suppose CMJ benefits college radio music directors the most. And now bloggers.” Nevertheless, Hyman’s labels have hosted CMJ showcases several times since 2000, and he estimated he’s attended the festival 13 times.

When you cast aside the make-you-or-break-you narrative, though, there are subtle benefits to CMJ, bands said. “Though everyone likes to fantasize about big crowds and label offers, I think realistically we just wanted to play for a few new people at a new venue and to add CMJ to our collective resume,” wrote Nate Frey, whose band Last Tide played a set at the Brooklyn venue Littlefield, in an e-mail.

The Annandale, Va.-based doom-metal band Salome performed at one of CMJ’s only metal showcases, which Relapse Records sponsored. The band signed to Profound Lore Records over the summer, and said it sees CMJ the way most bands do: as an opportunity for exposure. Rob Moore, the group’s guitarist, said that performing under the Relapse banner meant a large turnout, and that as much as the music industry has changed in recent years, labels remain important as brands and filters. “If I were just to record something and stick it on the Internet, the chances of somebody hearing it are next to none,” Moore said. “So you still need a record label or blogs or Web sites or something to guide your path.” CMJ, he said, can connect bands to all those things, even if it may not deliver a recording contract.

Following exposure comes networking. “You’re basically going to meet people and hope something good comes out of it,” says Patrick Kigongo, of Ra Ra Rasputin. “As long as bands realize that they’re not going to have some sort of miracle happen to them, they’ll have fun.” He said his band—which CMJ initially wait-listed but later asked to a join a showcase—met other artists and a label with whom it may release something soon, not to mention a dubious show promoter who didn’t carry business cards.

Elliott, of These United States, said he appreciates CMJ for its more serendipitous possibilities—like meeting a band whose music you admire, or scoring a short write-up on a New York Times blog. These United States also met up with a producer from a studio where it may record its next album, and took some time to check out the space.

Evan Brody, who helps run D.C.’s Underwater Peoples label even though he lives in New Jersey, said someone from the Mexican People Summer label came to one of his showcases, and that he even had a conversation with Ryan Schreiber, the founder of the influential review Web site Pitchfork. And he met some of the bloggers that helped Underwater Peoples become one of this year’s most-talked-about petri dishes for young bands. “I think it helped put a lot of faces to a lot of people who I’ve spoken to,” he said. “There was a lot of IRLing going on.”

Photo courtesy of Salome’s MySpace page.

Duchess Says, from Montreal, performs at Arlene’s Grocery in New York City on Wednesday.

Kria Brekkan at Cameo Gallery: A cynic might say Kría Brekkan’s hour-long set at the Paw Tracks label showcase confirmed numerous clichés about Iceland’s parochial peculiarity. To wit: Pretend Lars von Trier’s costume team had reimagined Sabrina the Teenage Witch and you’re still falling short on quirk, insularity, and shamanic strangeness. Crazy-eyed, angel-voiced, and spooky-thin, Brekkan employed all the womblike abstraction of her former band, múm, but none of its glitchy restraint. And because Brekken invoked a very natal image when she crouched on the floor and peeled her dress over her body, I feel OK suggesting that her lengthy, deconstructed nursery rhymes (conjured via laptop, a row of voice-manipulating pedals, and an accordion) could credibly soundtrack a birth. Brekkan performs at Floristree in Baltimore tonight at 9 p.m.

More favorites from CMJ after the jump: bad beach similes, calisthenic indie rock, and intimidating French Canadians!

Surf City at Cake Shop: The inside-baseball joke at CMJ this year had something to do with a lot of bands—like Real Estate and the rest of the Underwater Peoples crew—really digging on the beach. Surfer Blood—a much-buzzed, erudite five-piece from the Florida city where my grandparents used to winter—was safe and reliable, like SPF 100, while Surf City—a loud, lanky, heavily reverbed four-piece from New Zealand—more or less obliterated my desire to make bad shore similes. In hyperbolic songs that crescendoed and climaxed but rarely cycled, the group uncorked its country’s best ’80s export, the Dunedin Sound, with reverence and gusto. Every critic worth his or her weight in seven-inches has mentioned this band’s debt to The Clean, to which I can’t object.  But in my mind, Surf City was all Buzzcocks.

Darwin Deez at Santos Party House: This ostensible acid casualty from New York refers to his music as “indie rock with a side of calisthenics,” which is apt insofar as he looks like Richard Simmon’s string-beanish doppelganger and his band segues between songs by dancing to “Single Ladies.” (They’ve got choreography, too!) I’m not going to defend those gimmicks, but I’ll go to bat for the songs, which were all quirky, Malkmusian swagger and fried, hyperimaginative wistfulness.

Duchess Says at Arlene’s Grocery: There are bands whose studio output I will never appreciate—think the Les Savy Fav school of high-bombast, high-testosterone indie rock—but whose live shows really can’t be missed. Duchess Says is one of those bands. Singer Annie-Claude Deschenes was frenetic and ferocious: Like Kria Brekkan, she spent moments of her set spreadeagled on the floor, except in her case that meant several feet into the crowd, not on stage. The band, meanwhile, took as much from early-oughts electroclash as jerky, Lightning Bolt-style noise. It’s a testament to Duchess Says’ live act that it takes listening to its recordings to realize how much all roads lead to Devo.

Pill Wonder at Delancey: Here was the most overstated-looking lo-fi band you’ll see this year. This Seattle septet has two drummers, two keyboardists and a scuzzy aesthetic that oscillates between Titus Andronicus’s lush, loud angst and the Elephant 6 collective’s punchy psych pop. Everything was excessive—the instrumentation, the gang vocals, the intentional sloppiness—save the songs, which where anthemic and efficient. How else to ensure that more is more?