Warm weather, party music, and hordes of excited fans were the theme of the day at The Williamsburg Waterfront for the second of JellyNYC’s Pool Parties for 2010.

I wasn’t even going to attend yesterday. The day before was spent at Sirenfest and the heat and crowds and loud music had started to get to me. I was wiped out, but who would let a little thing like heatstroke keep them from good, free music?

The opening act was Detroit’s Silverghost. On the bill with The Murder City Devils and stationed out of Detroit, your immediate suppositions that it’s yet another in a long line of by the numbers garage rock is wrong. Silverghost makes synthpunk dance music in the two-piece boy/girl configuration. Synth and guitar are combined to complement the otherworldly harmonies of the duo. The guitar and synth work are nothing technically impressive, but it’s good, competent work on both ends. It’s a bit too rough to be easily inserted into a synthpop / electro pop set, but it’s not serrated enough to be scarred by the rock flourishes that are brought to the music by the guitar. It’s a fun addition to the unpretentious party rock genre. You can download their EP Equine Lips for free from their rcrdlbl page and it comes recommended.

JEFF the Brotherhood’s Jake was sick with the flu and had been all week, to the point of having to cancel on a show in Philadelphia. Yet, like the drone garage rock troopers they are, they managed to put on an excellent show on what was probably the largest stage they’d yet played on. I know JEFF through reputation more so than the music itself, but even in an incapacitated state, they managed to produce guitar tones that carried on in a bit of a drone / desert rock tradition pumping out bass you could feel down by the water. It was pretty amazing to behold.

The Obits came onstage and played a bunch of material with which I wasn’t familiar, but to be absolutely honest, I just wasn’t feeling it. It was well done rock n roll that pulled apart its influences and put it back into new and interesting configurations, but it wasn’t as good as I Blame You, their first album on SubPop, and nestled third into the a line up of feel-good up-tempo party rock, it lacked that certain frisson that the best live rock n roll carries. Which is, of course, not to say that any of it was “bad” it just broke the flow of the show thematically.

I walked into the Murder City Devils thinking they were just a B-List rock band that coalesced influences from the same touchstones that informed acts like Hot Snakes, The Night Marchers and the like. It was always music I would bop along to, but it never really grabbed me in the way that would cause me to seek it out.

After yesterday’s show, I’m a convert.

Passionate intense music fueled with a obsessive’s compulsion toward music. Rock n Roll stripped bare of pretense, transported back to when it was gutter music for gutter people who had dreams, not aspirations.

The crowd was really into it and the pit was full of passionate people as song after song produced cheers and the kind of sing-alongs you used to see at hardcore shows. Fists in the air, punctuating each word as fans pushed fans aloft to surf on the excitement and community.

As the final song ended on the encore, as Murder City Devils had been on for around an hour, the tired, sweaty crowd worked their way out of the park, trading stories and smiles.

A great end to a great weekend.