Reporting CMJ: It’s a hard job, but someone has to do it. Free drinks, tons of bands, general revelry; it can be tough at times. But being the dedicated journalists we are, the Entertainment staff combined our powers to tell you about the standout acts we’ve seen so far this week.

Tuesday was a bit of a warm up day for everyone. After the CMJ-sponsored media mixer at the LimeWire Space kicked things off, it would suffice to say that we were very warm. Despite the deliciousness of the free cocktails and the fact that Margaret Cho DJ-ed, I’m pretty sure this was just a ploy by CMJ to get all the people who were going to write about the bands they showed so liquored up that they would just go nuts over everything they saw. It may have worked.

For people put off by excessive happiness and enthusiasm (I know you’re out there), maybe give Jukebox the Ghost (pictured) a pass. The three-man band’s Bowery Ballroom show last night had a certain gleeful insanity to it—largely due to frontman Ben Thornewill’s dinner plate-sized buggin’ eyes, wild keyboard-pounding and manic gesticulations.

We all loved them. Natan was impressed by lead singer and pianist Ben Thornewill’s smooth vocals. He wasn’t sure if their sound would pan out as well as it does on his album but he proved himself. The high notes he can flawlessly reach reminded me a lot of The Shins’ James Mercer. The problem is their best songs sound very similar at times, especially at the beginnings. They are going to need to “wow” us a bit more to make it to the next level in their careers. But overall it was a very fun show. Here’s another shot:

Samantha and Jake saw Golden Silvers (below) at BLVD for a late night set on Tuesday, but their set the next day was “comically better,” as Jake put it,  so we’ll just write about that one. Samantha has already written about them for Tuesday Track a few weeks back, but in case you forgot, Golden Silvers are a London based band that sounds like all your favorite Britpop/rock bands smushed together, with a distorted synth thrown in for good measure. We were all there for their extremely packed show at Bowery Poetry Club. They played a banging set, and the lead singer actually smiled, which Samantha had not seen him do in all three times she’s seen them play. Samantha and Jake were big fans, Keyana seemed pretty sold, but Natan wasn’t convinced until their absolutely phenomenal performance of their single, True No. 9 Blues (True Romance), a film of which you can find in our previous post.

Photos by Jake Moore