Day one of CMJ started off with some buzzy indie rock and ended with some lighter folk fare. With nothing but a few tacos in between, it all added up to a slow start to what many are already considering a lighter CMJ week than usual. After catching up with friends on Ludlow Street (the unofficial center of the post-Fader Lounge CMJ world) it was time to catch Holiday Shores and Small Black at Cake Shop during Pop Tarts Suck Toasted Day Party.

Holiday Shores played a few songs that I thought were great, but there were also many which didn’t grab my attention. They certainly do have great energy and I hope they develop more songs like those that ended the set, which had creative melodies and interesting harmonic progressions. I don’t mean to single them out here, but I am really over the whole shout-a-couple-words-in-unison thing. Unless you’re the Beastie Boys, don’t be afraid to spilt up and sing some harmonies once in a while.

The praise surrounding Small Black’s music is deserved. They combine electronics (drum machine, keyboards, sampler) and more traditional elements (live drums, bass guitar, vocals) to create a lush soundscape which is packed with musical ideas and propulsive, but not overbearing. Having been a fan of lead-singer Josh’s previous band Slowlands, it was nice to hear his ideas executed using a new sound. His voice – treated with copious amounts of delay and reverb – is subservient to the dense musical landscape that envelopes it. Although, for this reason, I do think the vocals translate better on record then they do live. When there’s a human in front of you, standing downstage-center, opening his mouth and emitting noise, you can’t help but focus the bulk of your attention there. Worth special mention is Small Black’s bassist, who had great stage presence and sound. As soon as I started to think he was being made redundant by the synths and drum machine, he would stop playing bass to bang out some percussion parts and it became obvious how much he contributed to the low end of their sound. More bass players need to stop playing during a song just so that people can miss them while they’re gone.

The evening turned out to be a laid-back affair at The Living Room with two bands who defy grammatical convention – papercranes and KaiserCartel. This version of papercranes was quite different than the one who played an electric set at last year’s After The Jump Fest. Here, they were stripped down to acoustic guitar, bass, piano and a snare drum which allowed the vocals, all four of them, to take center stage. Highlights of the set included a cover of Big Star’s “Thirteen” and the beautiful wordless chorus of “Synapses” which you can hear on their myspace page.

Courtney Kaiser and Benjamin Cartel are fantastic musicians with strong, confident voices and precise musicianship who execute their relatively simple and catchy songs with ease. If you have heard their most popular song “Oh, No” (video here) then you would know what to expect from their songwriting, but their performance exceeded my expectations. Few artists connect with the audience as well as they do. Courtney tried her best to sing a bit of their final song to each and every audience member as they performed while wandering through the crowd, but that level of intimacy was achieved during the entire set. Dressed in red and black it was hard to keep from thinking of them as the folk version of the White Stripes and I wouldn’t be surprised if their career begins to approach such popularity in the coming year.

The only thing that bothered me about KaiserCartel was that they were described in their CMJ blurb as a “Minimal, lo-fi indie folk duo creating wistfully pleasant music”. The Lo-Fi term certainly seems to have been overused and abused in the past year. As I have come to understand it, elements of Lo-Fi include vocals that sound like they were recorded using microphones that have been dropped a few hundred times (or purchased at radio shack), amplifiers with vacuum tubes just barely clinging to life, digital bit crushing, tape noise, reduced intelligibility of lyrics, etc. KaiserCartel’s music may be simplistic, but it is polished, shiny and very much high fidelity as far as I’m concerned. There are some great current bands who I certainly would consider low fidelity such as The Beets and Times New Viking, but alas, Lo-Fi is losing its edge as it’s reduced to the newest buzz word.

The more bands I see this week, the less I’ll probably write about them, so enjoy this update.

There was an undeniable camaraderie among the crowd – a common feeling that we were lucky to be there. We were all thankful to whomever introduced us to this band who has so graciously distanced themselves from the rest of the music industry. The disaffected and emotionally detached rock persona that we’ve come to expect from our “indie bands” was refreshingly absent. It all boiled down to something so elementary, so primal, that the other shows I’ve attended in the past year became tedious and contrived by comparison. What I witnessed was nothing more than four human beings, physically manipulating wood, metal and plastic to create sounds – magnified by electricity – that expressed their collective thoughts and personality.

The Wrens have written some of the most intimate and affecting break-up songs you’ve ever heard, including “Happy” and “She Sends Kisses”. They delivered the words of these heart-wrenching songs like they were penned just yesterday. At one point during “Happy”, I turned to my buddy Bret and remarked, “I don’t know when he wrote this song, but he still fucking means it”. Charles and Kevin have a keen ability to develop their own inspirations and emotions into such accessible songs that it’s easy to make them your own.

If you are already a fan of The Wrens then you probably know about how they split with their label in the mid-‘90s when offered a huge contract to become a more radio-friendly band. You know that they spent seven years creating “The Meadowlands” with little financial and creative support outside of their friends and families. The first time I saw The Wrens I wasn’t aware of this back-story, but it was still obvious that these guys were on stage because they loved sharing their creative efforts with other people, not because they needed to recoup album costs or support a lavish lifestyle.

You don’t necessarily need to understand The Wrens history to love The Wrens music. But the path they’ve traveled does help to explain why they’re a band that doesn’t worry about whether or not they’re wearing the proper outfits on stage or whether their guitars are perfectly in tune. Like any great band, their instruments reflect their personality – battered, adored, and slightly dissonant – yet capable of forming a union that is far more powerful than just wood, metal, plastic and flesh alone.

The Wrens play their second New York show in two years at the Bell House on April 10th. Tickets here. See you there.