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This blog post was submitted by Max Willens, ZIO's Music Channel Assistant.

CMJ badge-holders will sometimes forget that they can't get into everything. Every year, there are usually about a half-dozen CMJ shows that sell out with the general public.

At those shows, only a limited number of "badges" get in, and last night (Wednesday), there were two. The much-hyped British quartet xx played what will probably be the smallest venue they see this year, the Mercury Lounge, and Atlas Sound and Broadcast tried to shrug off the previous night's negative press at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

A full hour before the doors were supposed to open at Mercury Lounge, a line stretched down the block and around a corner, and the Music Hall turned "badges" away by the dozens. So rather than cover shows that were mostly populated by paying customers, we decided to highlight stuff that more people had a chance to get into.

The IAMSOUND showcase at the Bowery Poetry Club, for example, spanned the increasingly fertile middle ground between ringing indie rock and electronic dance and pop. After early sets by Faces on Film and New Villager, the Brooklyn-based quintet Apache Beat offered a tight set of limber post-punk basslines, animated, bongo-filled drumming and lead singer Christina Aceto's powerful voice. At times, Aceto sounds like a more angsty Chrissie Hynde, but the rest of the band seemed to be making music for somebody else; the rhythm section, rather than backing Aceto up, wound up crowding her, and they wound up diminishing the entire show in the process. 

And while the audience seemed largely indifferent to Apache Beat's set, the act that followed, Suckers, forced them to pick sides. The chameleonic quartet from Brooklyn played a whimsical mix of electronic pop and heavy-footed rock with bizarre verve, relishing their music's abrupt changes in sound and style: their members played guitars with one hand and MPCs with the other; they leapt from slight guitar melodies and woozy synth lines to galloping drums and gnashing guitar solos; their drummer left his stool to rap his sticks against the side of his kit instead; open, jangling guitars got blasted aside by mournful trumpets.

Describing bands in relation to one another is an increasingly fruitless endeavor, and comparing Suckers to other bands would be a huge a waste of time. But at least in spirit, their willful, winsome oddness and their music' 90-degree turns recall everybody from '70s art-punks like Devo to Mike Patton's Mr. Bungle. The liberated, unpredictable nature of those bands originated from a dark place, a sense that a great deal of life is totally meaningless. The deeply entrenched irony and free-associative bent of Suckers lyrics suggest they hold a similar outlook, but their music suggests that, if nothing else, they believe in one another.