Photos by Jayson Yee
Last week of CMJ was like a sleep-deprived, mildly stressful vacation, and I love every second of it. Normally I browse the small venues opting for free to practically free shows, but this time around, I also had the pleasure of going to Terminal 5 to see Luxley, Milo Greene and Bombay Bicycle Club. This concert now has me reconsidering my prior “only cheap/free shows” mentality.
I had never heard of opener Luxley, but they basically knocked my socks off and made me a fan in just one set. They were so upbeat as frontman Ryan Gray pranced across the stage, hitting some relatively high notes as he went. At one point, he ventured into the crowd and there were no complaints about it. They ended the set with their song “Dance Baby”, which was full of rolling drums, “woah oh oh’s” and lots of dancing from the whole band and crowd. The New Orleans-based band definitely set the stage for a dance-filled, high energy night, which is exactly the type of concert I seek out.
I’ve wanted to see Milo Greene since their self-titled album was released in 2012, so this next set was a particularly sweet treat for me. The best way to describe the band overall is to to say they were handsome as hell and had me dancing my ass off. They started off with some new songs from their forthcoming album (to be released in January 2015 — YAY!) and of course played their newest single, “White Lies”. Then they moved into older, more familiar territory with “1957” and “What’s the Matter?” before unleashing a few more new ones.
At this point, the crowd had been pumped up accordingly for Bombay Bicycle Club to take the stage, and the London foursome brought lots of synthy, danceable goodness with them. There were these wonderful visualizations in the background during their set, which definitely had me distracted (momentarily) from swaying and head bobbing — sometimes they were just churning and spinning shapes while other times there were skeleton bands dancing and playing instruments along with the actual band. When they played “Shuffle”, people were clapping and bopping to the thick bassline and soaring guitars, and this just further brought the night full circle. If you can’t tell, I had an amazing time and even got to accomplish one of my annual CMJ goals of discovering some fun new music.