CMJ 2007: Almost Killed Me Pt. 2
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You know what, fuck it, I’m gonna come clean: I really don’t enjoy writing live reviews. I don’t know what it is, I’m just really not into it. And writing about CMJ just feels like bragging sometimes and I don’t really like how that comes across. Plus, I didn’t see anyone on Thursday or Friday that you haven’t already read about on this site (and every other one like it) thousands of times before. M.I.A. was a fucking party, as were Erol Alkan and MSTRKRFT (especially when they dropped “Da Funk” and their ill “D.A.N.C.E.” remix within ten minutes of each other), and Justice was honestly mind-blowing. Easily the best thing I’ve seen since Daft Punk in Hyde Park, which is no small feat considering LCD Soundsystem put on a pretty much flawless performance at Randall’s Island earlier this month.
A lot of this had to do with the fact that I’ve legitimately never seen a crowd so into a show. Even after the band had finished their encore and the house lights came on, the crowd hung around to scream out “We! Are! Your friends! You’ll! Never be alone again!” for a good ten more minutes, prompting the duo to come out and make one last curtain call from high up on the second-level balcony to roaring applause. Once out in the streets, people were pretty much just hanging around, still buzzing about the epic performance they’d just seen, when a car drove by pumping “We Are Your Friends” on the soundsystem and people just started dancing and belting out that chorus right there in the street. Shit was awesome. One thing though, I’d somehow managed to totally sleep on “DVNO” to this point until I totally woke up to it when they dropped it in their set on Saturday, so definitely get on that below if you’d made the same mistake I did. Also, did anyone stick around long enough at Studio B to see if Justice played that “secret” set that people had been whispering about all week? We were there for the first hour (maybe two, who even knows) of Erol Alkan’s set before we rolled out. We saw Xavier chilling in the background up in the DJ booth, but did he ever actually play? I’d be interested in hearing how it was if it actually happened/anyone saw it.
MP3: “DVNO” - Justice
Finally, I also caught Black Kids playing Brooklynvegan’s final day party at R Bar, which was apparently their only good show of the week. They’re performance was kind of cheesy (any mention of the word “heart” in their lyrics was always accompanied by keyboardist Ali making a little heart-shaped sign with her fingers and there were plenty more lame moves where that came from) and the lead singer came off as a bit of a prick at times, but I guess I might too if I’d spent the last four days being told by everyone in the industry that I was fronting the best band in the history of music ever (which is what seemed to be the consensus on Black Kids heading into the festival - they were the band to see). All that aside though, they put on a fucking great show. Most in attendance had only heard the four song demo available on their MySpace and I’ve got the full eight song version they sent to labels, and they still had great songs even beyond that. One track from the full-length demo that I haven’t seen hyped up nearly enough ’round the blogs is “Listen To Your Body Tonight, which totally slayed at R Bar on Friday. Ali takes lead vocals on this one and steals the show, but its that back-and-forth dialogue between her and Reggie towards the middle (”Hell-O?”, “Hello this is your body”, “What do you want my body?”, etc.) that totally rules despite the fact that it blatantly shouldn’t. Check it out below and sorry for any of those who wanted a full-fledged rundown like Part 1, but something tells me there aren’t very many of you included in that group.
MP3: “Listen To Your Body Tonight” - Black Kids ((highly recommended))
And I might as well take this time to address this issue: Apparently a lot of you are having trouble with the downloads? I’ve gotten a lot of complaints that the tracks often download only halfway or less before timing out, yet any time I try to download a file it always works fine without fail… So I’m not really sure what to do. Basically, how many of you are having this issue? And anyone have any ideas how I can fix it? Get at me in the comments.
October 24th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Justice did play that “secret” set on Saturday night. It went from 3 until about 4:30. It was pretty good. Really mixed it up a lot (kind of the way their essential mix for BBC was all over the map), made for a very fun and danceable set.
October 25th, 2007 at 1:21 am
I find that if I physically watch the thing download whilst crossing all available limbs, the download will get past 80%.
October 25th, 2007 at 2:10 am
all of my downloads have been working. thanks for the new black kids song derek
October 25th, 2007 at 3:00 am
yeah, it does happen to me sometimes, and to my friend as well. usually if i try again it works
October 25th, 2007 at 4:44 am
That dude to the left of MSTRKRFT (with the towel) is Lazaro Casanova, who is another amazing DJ. He plays more traditional house than them, but he brought the house down at the Echo Project.
October 25th, 2007 at 4:58 am
I’ve had a few occasions where it would download for about 60% then stop, but these latest songs downloaded gloriously. Thanks much, Derek.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Yeah it has happened to some of my downloads. Glad to see it’s not a problem my end!
October 25th, 2007 at 6:22 am
It happened to me a couple of times last year. It usually worked the second time round though.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:41 am
I found that it took me ages to get hold of the MSTRKRFT remix of NYPC off of your post a while back.
I resorted to staring at the download, and eventually, that seemed to work.
So stare people.
October 25th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Usually have to restart it a few times.. however sometimes my download manager bombs out no matter what saying it’s not the same filesize or something.. i just use another browser.
So badly waiting for Daft Punk to come to australia later this year…
October 25th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Justice and MIA - fuck thats a gig of the Gods.
Downloads work fine for me.
derek - are you mourning Oink? What else are you using now - I joined Libble - its not the best unfortunately.
October 25th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
its hit or miss with the downloads. sometimes its really frustrating and the larger sized files never seem to fully download. but with the smaller ones they usually work within one or two tries.
what do we do without oink?!
October 25th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
i’ve been having a lot of trouble recently downloading full songs lately from this website, which is a shame because it’s discouraging me from checking it out as often as i used to.
October 25th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
yeah …. I’m having trouble finishing downloads from this site and sometimes from AllThingsGo. The file seems to just decide that it’s done downloading, and pretend that it’s finished, even though it’s obviously jumped from 40% or 55% or whatever right up to 100%.
If it helps, I use firefox on both Mac and Windows. I can try on Ubuntu later, who knows…
October 25th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
i didn’t know oink was down. i found out in the comments here. I figured they were just doing maintenance or something…
this is unheard of. oink?? down??? demonoid survived. i was sure oink would no matter how bad the situation was (should’ve googled).
man..i hope they don’t go after the users too…
October 25th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
oh fuck. i just read the disclaimer/notice on oink.cd
users may be screwed as well…?
October 25th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
wow michael. where have you been the last 2 days
October 26th, 2007 at 1:09 am
yeah i’ve been having problems with the downloads too. if i really wanted to download a song instead of the right-click-save-as thing i open the file in a new window to make sure the whole thing is downloaded before saving it. usually have to refresh several times …which is pretty annoying. but i guess it’s better than nothing.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:32 am
yeah…being out of the loop is the story of my life, haha
On another note, “DVNO” has always been one of my favorites from the album. It kicks ass! Wooo!
October 26th, 2007 at 4:43 am
The downloads seem to stop at a random time for me and never complete, so I get a taste of the song but never the whole thing. Oh well, content is still the bomb.
October 26th, 2007 at 9:55 am
I saw Justice & The Chemical Brothers last night as part of the BBC Electric Proms - absolutely mind blowing!
October 26th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Alright so it seems like the downloading issues aren’t the absolute end of the world, but it’s still an issue that you guys ideally would not have to deal with… That said, I don’t really know what to do - if I contact my server, then they’ll know I’m hosting MP3s and considering I’m hosted on the same server as OiNK was, that doesn’t seem like a great idea.
And yes, I am mourning the loss of OiNK. Every minute. Of every day.
Let me know if anyone has any bright ideas as to what I could do to remedy this downloading issue. My next post will be M3 Volume 15 and there will be a mass download option (via Megaupload) as usual so that the downloading issues can be avoided, but I’d really like to get this resolved sooner rather than later.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Hey Derek,
I have had some issues with the ‘M’ volumes - when I try backing up my music collection its ususally the ‘M’ compliations that wont copy across - and the text is greeen (I use Vista) Do the mp3’s have some sort of DRM in them? Its not a biggie as this is only for my backups, but was just wondering.
Incidentally for the M albums maybe you could offer a megaupload link as an alternative if it doesnt work for some people?
Keep up the great work Derek, this site keeps my music taste growingand growing.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Hey Chris,
I’ve never used Vista, so I don’t know what the green text means, but I can assure you there’s no DRM protection or anything of that sort. Also, I always offer a Megaupload link for the full album .zip file in the M3 posts, so no worries regarding that.
October 27th, 2007 at 1:24 am
How to fix the problem depends on what web server software is used. So let us know.
-E
October 27th, 2007 at 1:25 am
Ok so the host probably has a max timeout for an HTTP connection, probably best to leave it alone if you want to stay hosted there.
-E
October 27th, 2007 at 5:32 am
Hi, thanks for another Black Kids track. Really like them, have done a post over at my blog, 17 Seconds and linked to your CMJ post (not the mp3!).
October 28th, 2007 at 7:43 am
I’ve only had problems with downloads when I try to get more than one song at a time. If you go one by one you should be good.
And by the way Derek, CMJ makes me so jealous I could die.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
wow. very nice pics u take. the black kids are so hot. best wishes from germany guys.
October 29th, 2007 at 11:44 am
Have you heard any of Those Dancing Days yet? I’ve got their EP if you fancy a listen. They’re currently preventing me from properly doing this essay.
Also, Waffles?
November 1st, 2007 at 4:37 am
Great post. As mentioned above, Justice and M.I.A. is a gig of the gods.
Are the pictures available in higher resolution? Most of them are awesome!
November 5th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I’ve been staring at the Black Kids download, but it’s still not downloading.
November 13th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Jamie, I’d love to hear Those Dancing Days if yu can post!
January 1st, 2008 at 5:51 pm
umm, I randomly came across this page on your blog and recognized the 4th picture from the top (the green-ish one of MSTRKRFT). turns out that that’s my photo, I took it at their show during the CMJ week in studio b.
it’s posted on my blog www.itsoktosweat.blogspot.com and on my flickr: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2247/1656870194_cc6d01591b_o.jpg
I don’t mind you using it, but if you could please give me credit or something then I’d appreciate that. it’s not a great photo but yeah.
thanks
January 1st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
oh, and how did you get a hold of it?