Tabi Bonney performs at Fat Baby last night in New York City.

The thing about CMJ is, not all of it’s CMJ. There are the unoffocial day parties—free, sometimes invite-only events sponsored by record labels, PR firms, and media. There are the more exclusive parties at night. And there are the shows that, although not nominally part of the five-day conference and music festival, go on anyway, right in the middle of it all.

Take Casper Bangs‘ show last night at Pianos, which was sponsored by the weekly concert series Cross-Polination and was not part of the official CMJ roster. Nevertheless, the band—the project of Rob Pierangeli, who used to play in the Hard Tomorrows—played to a nearly full room.

Pierangeli paid $45 when he applied to play at this year’s CMJ, but his band was turned down. “Sorry to be frank, but I don’t see if the music has that much to do with who gets in,” he told me today. “So if you want to play, you have to know someone. Everyone knows that though. That’s not new information.”

Read More “CMJ Notebook: Casper Bangs, Shots of District Acts, Kiwi Rock” »

Middle Distance Runner performs at the CMJ Music Marathon in 2008.

Every CMJ has its success story—the unknown act who, thanks to buzz and grit and talent and luck , tickles the right trigger of the wayfaring label rep or taste-maker who, for whatever reason, has decided to see it. But most of the thousand-plus little-known bands and artists who descend on New York City each fall for the College Music Journal Music Marathon don’t walk away with freshly inked contracts or top-tier management. Their game is more incremental: A write-up here, a handshake there. So whether they’re dampening expectations or they mean it, it’s probably unsurprising that most of the D.C. bands performing during this year’s CMJ say their primary goal is just to “have fun.”

“These things are kind of a madhouse, and there’s a lot of talk of ‘there’s gonna be a lot of industry people,’” says Matt Dowling, whose band Deleted Scenes has two CMJ gigs and a meeting with a marketing firm. ”I don’t mean to be a cynic, but we’ve been playing for long enough and pined over certain goals to realize that the bottom line is to have fun. If the industry happens to like it, then great.”

John Thornley, of U.S. Royalty, is equally cautious: “I don’t think we’re going to go there and get a record, and I mean, it may happen. The goal is just to go there and play a show and get a lot of people.” But he also sees less tangible benefits. “If you meet a band at a party, and you like their music and they like yours, it’s that much more easy to work with them.”

At least a dozen bands and artists from the District will play gigs during this year’s CMJ, which starts tomorrow night and runs through Saturday, and includes about 75 different venues across New York City (there are also panel discussions and a film festival). Some acts already have recording contracts, others don’t, and all of them—once you get past their shared enthusiasm for merriment—have different goals.

Read More “For District Artists, Mixed and Measured Expectations for CMJ” »

For more info about upcoming shows — free, kid- and date-friendly, or otherwise — see our Summer Music Guide.

• Cricket Fusion Quartet. 1905. Call for price.
• Jonathan Coulton, Chelsea Lee. Birchmere. $29.50. All ages.
• Deleted Scenes, The XYZ Affair, Casper Bangs. Black Cat Backstage. $8. All ages.
• Dick Morgan. Blues Alley. $25.
• Buster Brown and The Get Down. Cafe Martini. Call for price.
• Tally Hall, Malbec, Prabir & the Substitutes. DC9. $12. +18.
• Pree, Dead Heart Bloom, Tripp. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12. +21.
• NSO: “Nights at the Movies: A Night on the Red Carpet.” Kennedy Center Concert Hall. $20–$65.
• Berklee College of Music: Liz Longley. Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Free.
• Old Crow Medicine Show. Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. $25.
• Toad the Wet Sprocket, Eddie From Ohio. National Harbor. $16.50-$35.
• The Jones, The Known Unknowns, The Very Small. Rock & Roll Hotel. $8. All ages.
• Maryland Deathfest Pre-fest show w/ Ghoul. Sonar. $10. All ages.
• Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Dead Rock West. The State Theatre. $15.
• Hopewell, The Flying Eyes, Bad Liquor Pond. The Talking Head. $10.
• Fight the Bear, The Blue Line, Imaginary Friends. Velvet Lounge. $8. +21.

Photo of the XYZ Affair by Kyle Gustafson, via MySpace.

Saturday

• Deleted Scenes, The Drones, Pretty & Nice (mainstage); 100th BLISS Dance Party w/ DJ Will Eastman (backstage). Black Cat. $12/$7. All ages.
• WVAU presents Capitol Punishment VI w/ Ponytail, Screaming Females, Mittenfields. American University Kay Spiritual Life Center. FREE. All ages.
• Honor By August CD Release w/ The Alternate Routes, The Ruse, Melodime. 9:30 club. $15. All ages.
• Asobi Seksu, Tyvjk, Detox Retox. Rock and Roll Hotel. $12. All ages.
• TK Webb & the Visions, Appomatox, Gods & Queens. DC9. $8. +18.
• The Jaguar Club, Loose Lips, Paperhaus, Mary Bragg. The Red & The Black. $8. +21.
• Garotas Suecas, DJ Neville Chamberlain. Comet Ping Pong. FREE. All ages.
• Middle Distance Runner, Eulogies, Payola Reserve. IOTA Club & Cafe. $12. +21.
• Chanticleer. Strathmore. $28-$68. All ages.
• John Eaton. The Barns at Wolf Trap. $25. All ages.
• Christian Tamburr Quartet. Kennedy Center Millennium Stage. Free. All ages.

Read More “Weekend Music Round-Up” »

In celebration of Deleted Scenes‘ first headlining gig on the Black Cat’s mainstage or, possibly, just to give you some added incentive to show up, the band has assembled 200 limited-edition cassingles that will be available at the show.

I realize that there’s a generational divide here, that some of you may have come of age in the late-’90s as opposed to the early-’90s, so I’ll do my best to explain the cassingle phenomenon. The cassingle was, if you will, a cassette single. It had two to three songs on it. One of these songs was usually a “hit.” If you were too broke, or simply unwilling, to buy an entire album by, say, Nine Inch Nails, you could step into Sam Goody and get the “Closer” cassingle. Then you took it home and, if you were so blessed, popped it into your ghetto-blaster. Anyway, before Napster, this is what we had.

A free-download will be included with each cassette, just in case you don’t have that ghetto-blaster anymore.

Here’s the track-list:

a side: Suicide Sunday (previously unreleased)
b side: Ithaca (Autorock remix)

Deleted Scenes w/ The Drones, Pretty & Nice
@ Black Cat
Fri., 3/28/09
$12, 9 pm
1811 14th St. NW

Maybe noon was a little bit too ambitious a time to get the DC Does Texas Showcase started, given that the majority of Austin’s population seemed to be out late last night, swigging tall-boys of PBR. As a result, the streets were kind of bare, even at 1:20, when Deleted Scenes went on.

Not a bad show, though. Not too poorly attended either, with people meandering in off of the street to watch Deleted Scenes singer Dan Scheuerman spaz-out on stage.

Photos after the jump.
Read More “Deleted Scenes/Middle Distance Runner @ DC Does Texas Showcase” »

Which suggests that Birdseed Shirt 54% better than Thievery Corporation’s last album, but 5% worse than Fugazi’s The Argument.

But let’s not turn this positive moment into a snark-fest.

Says Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen:

“With Matt Dowling primarily on bass, Chris Scheffey on guitar, and Brian Hospital on drums, the band is a well-worn quartet that takes risks in the arrangements but never gets clever for the sake of it. They do big indie rock, like the build-up to the horns and harmony vocals that punctuate the opener, “Turn to Sand.”

Anyway, nice to see a local band get some love. Read the rest of the review here and maybe check them out, if you haven’t already, when Deleted Scenes play the main stage at Black Cat on March 28.

Friday

• Caverns, Deleted Scenes, Hammer No More The Fingers, Acedia. Rock and Roll Hotel. $10. All ages.
• Sweet Interference CD Release Party, Carousel Rogues, Earth Note Syndicate. The Red & The Black. $8. +21.
• Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Joan Jones. 9:30 club. $25. All ages.
• Lonely Hearts Club with DJ Decibelle, DJ Jackie O. and AK Slaughter (from Baltimore). Velvet Lounge. Free. +21.
• DJ Eskimo. Cafe Saint-Ex. Free. +21.

Read More “The Weekend’s Must-See Music Acts: Deleted Scenes, DJ Decibelle, and Cat Power” »

While Washington City Paper can probably agree with DCist that Joe is the dreamiest Jonas, Brightest Young Things have the biggest crush on Kevin. Likewise, the local AV Club and Express could be all up on Fleet Foxes, but DCist is decidedly uninterested.  (These are all hypothetical situations btw; I do not pretend to understand how any of these websites really feel about JoBromance or beardo rock). In short, it’s hard to get any consensus around here.

But it looks like Deleted Scenes have managed to plop themselves right down in the center of the venn diagram of DC blog titilation. Express, BYT, DCist, and the AV Club have all had pretty nice things to say about Birdseed Shirt, the band’s new record (Full disclosure: I wrote the AV Club piece). Hell, even we even said something nice, and we never like anything.

All the more reason to check Deleted Scenes out at their record release party, which is happening tonight over at Black Cat.

Deleted Scenes, Exit Clov, La Strada
Thu., 12/18, 8:30 pm
$10

What it is: In an e-mail suggesting the Sleigher consider this song from the Brooklyn/D.C. band’s upcoming album Birdseed Shirt, Deleted Scenes’ Dan Scheuerman describes it as “sort of a quarter-life Christmas carol about being strung out and trying to get it together enough to spend some time with your family.” Sure, but even if the specifics ring a bit exotic (”Cheer up, take some medication” he advises), anyone who’s ever returned to their family’s warm house from a life where things aren’t exactly just so will find something plangent here.

The bike under the tree: Scheuerman’s wobbly voice, singing lyrics that remind the Sleigher of getting on the Peter Pan from New York back home to Alexandria all dogeared with a box of clementines and $12 in the bank: “Dust off a box of old forgotten clothes/If you clean up nice, no one will ever know/’Cause what’s the point of one more disguise /When you’re not even yourself in your daily life?”

The lump of coal: The vintage Noise New York production is an additional postcard to those of us approaching decrepitude, but like the Galaxie 500 records it references (complete with weird reverb screams that could be strings, someone singing, or phantom piano) things get so soupy it’s easy to miss the great, self-hating lyrics.

Cheer factor: -4 out of 10, though it’s a good kind of hurt. “Keep your shit together for a couple days,” Scheuerman sings, reminding himself and the listeners that the holidays aren’t the only thing that can’t last forever.

LISTEN: “Get Your Shit Together for the Holidays”