Day one of The L Magazine’s Northside Festival is done and it was already a bit of a doozy. From last night’s many offerings, from Wavves and DOM at the Knitting Factory to ?uestlove DJing at Brooklyn Bowl to My Teenage Stride at The Charleston, we choose to cover MeanRed’s Crush Fest, a multi-genre, multi-room celebration of music MeanRed loves to dance to.

Taking over both of Public Assembly’s rooms, Crush Fest seemed like the perfect distillation of what Northside Festival strives to be. A collection of bands, both local and touring, that encapsulates interesting music. While MeanRed is known for their dance parties, this gave them a chance to stretch their muscles and display a side that many people may not know.

We showed up early, curious to see at least part of every band, not really knowing what to expect being unfamiliar with many of the acts, yet each one had something to offer to everyone with an interest in modern indie music.

The first act was Dinosaur Feathers, an indie pop band with a guitarist, a keyboardist a bassist and no drummer (“He tragically died but was easily replaced” the lead joked). It was good, entertaining with a full sound that was immediately endearing but tragically was stacked against the next act we caught (one of the tragedies of multi-room showcases).

Tayisha Busay is filthy, filthy, filthy party electro-banging crotch-pounding pan sexual glitter queens with synchronized dances and simulated sex acts. It’s essentially everything grownups in the Midwest think about the youth of today in New York. I loved every hilarious second of it, and you may too.

MillionYoung was a one piece, but performed as a two-piece, making Balearic pop shot through a haze of chill out blissful psychedelica. It’s that trip to Ibiza you could never afford to take. Great stuff but like much live dance music, it didn’t inspire much dancing. Move around a little, people. It’s good for you.

No Surrender was an aggressive hip-hop act that struck me as bordering on the conceptual as bars would contain little more than staccato percussive chants that sounded like Mingus’s exclamations. Behind them they showed a series of disturbing ephemeral images, which only further distanced the act from the rest of other acts in the genre. I liked it a great deal, but I will confess that I had difficulties
hearing the actual words in many of their verses.

Iran was stacked wrong in the list. Their slow melancholy sound should have been put closer to the start of the night instead of near the end as most of the crowd bailed. I was enjoying the disco house dj set by Denny Le Nimh in the back room, waiting for the Bounce music, so I didn’t catch more than half a song.

Rusty Lazer and Big Frieda were AMAZING. New Orleans Bounce was like a cracked out Dran-o chugging version of UK Hardcore meets 2 Step but shot through the diaspora of Black American music taking cues from Booty Bass, Bmore Club, House, Techno, and of course, Hip Hop. It may be the best thing I’ve heard in dance music in a while and Big Frieda topped the show given by Tayisha Busay.

The music was a combination of cut up samples stuttering with rap verses, call response and heavy bass and start stop rhythms. It would go from fast as hell to quarter speed with no warning and it had a huge amount of audience ass shaking participation, including, weirdly from a coterie of girl bike punks.

The unfortunate thing about the booty music is the absolutely creepy behavior on the part of a large part of the male audience last night. Girls bent over to shake their ass to the music and you just had people getting close with cameras like they were amateur proctologists. Disturbing as hell.

Then we took off for the night, we missed Fang Island but were too entranced by the “azz everywhere” and afterwards were worn out.

We’re looking to start all over again tonight, so make certain you follow me @gsl_live