CMJ Music Marathon
Day 4
October 19, 2007
New York, NY
Words: Cameron Cook
Photos: Abbey Braden
iLiKETRAiNS photos: Leonard Greco for leonardgreco.com

We decided to take it easy on Friday, given that we had already taken the blunt force of three days of hardcore partying directly to our craniums. We headed down to the Brooklyn Vegan showcase at the R Bar on Bowery to catch an early, EARLY (12:15) show by iLiKETRAiNS, our new favorite British rock band. They sound like Morrissey if he were actually depressed and not just sad for kicks, and their debut LP, Elegies and Lessons Learnt is chock full of heavy, post-rock epics steeped in British history: they even have a song about assassinated 19th century Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. Deep.

After an interview with the band (look for that one in ‘Sup 018, out in February 2008), we caught an early dinner and saw some of their evening set at Mercury Lounge.

The next event we dragged our dreary carcasses to was M.I.A.’s second night at new Bowery Presents venue Terminal 5, which is located on Neptune, we mean 56th street and 11th avenue. The trek was well worth it though, because as always, “that girl called Maya” fucking brought the house down, again. And again. And again. Opening with third-world stomper “Bamboo Banger”, M.I.A. tore through a greatest-hits set, featuring Arular favorites like “Pull Up The People”, “Sunshowers”, and of course, the modern classic “Galang”. Her new album Kala, however, provided the performance with the most dance hits, with “Paper Planes” getting the best crowd response of the evening, with 3,000 kids miming shooting guns into the air during the song’s chorus. During “Bird Flu”, M.I.A. announced “I need some crazy motherfuckers onstage with me for this one”, and proceeded to commandeer a 200+ person rave of hardcore fans from the front rows onstage with her. AND IT WASN’T EVEN THE LAST SONG. After the dust settled, she brought out the night’s special guest, Afrikan Boy, the 18-year-old Nigerian rapper she features on the Kala track “Hussel”. After a booty-shaking version of said song, M.I.A. and her posse leave the stage, having blown us as far away as humanly possible.

We were going to go and see Muscles play his headlining slot at Orchard Bar that night, but after having an alarming not-being-able-to-feel-our-limbs episode on the M.I.A. dance floor, we decided to call it a night and retreated to our uptown apartment to energize for the final stretch: CMJ day 5.