Surf City: "Autumn"
The Kiwi quartet plays New Zealand's version of classic rock—that is to say trippy indie-rock rife with slacker ebullience and backwards guitar riffs.

Frankie Rose: "Thee Only One"
Former Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls drummer Frankie Rose has gone solo, but her debut single doesn't fall too far from the reverb-soaked, Phil Spector-loving vine. "Thee Only One," is so hazy sounding that one must assume the song was recorded at the bottom of a cistern next to a fire fueled by old copies of Chickfactor.

Weezer (ft. Lil Wayne): "Can't Stop Partying"
For years now, old time Weezer fans have been down on their knees praying that Rivers Cuomo will finally get back to writing guitar rock and stop rapping/rap-rocking/repping Timbaland. "Can't Stop Partying," probably isn't what they had in mind, though. "Gotta have Patron, gotta have the beat/I gotta have a lot of pretty girls around me," sings Cuomo. Those wounded-but-nerdy words wouldn't have been a bad fit on Pinkerton, but the big synth splashes and the guest verse by Weezy, not so much. "The unusual is the fucking usual/Man my life is beautiful," raps Lil Wayne, who is at this point, may be the only person on the radio making weirder choices than Cuomo.

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?

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."

The problem, he said, is that bands have to apply to CMJ through a service called Sonicbids, which was conceived as a digital middle man between bands and show promoters. The CMJ application comes with a fee but is free for Sonicbids members, who pay around $70 a year.

Pierangeli doesn't like that arrangement, and he's not the only one (here's Sonicbids' response to the controversy over its submissions method and pricing). "Maybe a lot of artists are out there getting gigs and finding Sonicbids is a strong tool to advance their careers," Pierangeli said. "But not me. I’m just one experience, but it seems kind of like bullshit to me."

He said he doesn't want blow money an event whose impact seems to have diminished. Because of how technology and the economy have changed the recording industry, "perhaps there’s less incentive for the industry to really to come in [for CMJ]," Pierangeli said. "West Coast people don’t come out. They’re probably like, 'we’ll wait for South by Southwest or something. We’ll go to that instead.' So what the fuck are we doing coming up here? People just play it so they can say that they played it."

Still, he does see advantages to the festival. "I think the value is just connecting with new people and connecting with old people. In terms of maybe what CMJ what it once was, and bands getting signed and discovered, it’s not like that anymore."

Which is why, following the release of a 7-inch and an EP next month (you can hear the latter here), Casper Bangs will begin releasing singles frequently and for free. Pierangeli said he hopes to begin that project in December. Not that he doesn't love albums or lacks enough material to fill one. But, he said, "people just want songs right now. They don’t want to commit."

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Some shots of other District artists who performed last night during CMJ:

Deleted Scenes at Cameo Gallery:

True Womanhood (full disclosure: I'm friends with the band) at Cameo Gallery:

Tabi Bonney at Fat Baby. Niki Jean, from Bonney's pop group the Crybabies, joined him for a song:

Surf City, from New Zealand, at Cake Shop: