Nas / Photo by Kyle Dean Reinford
BEST CONTACT HIGH: NAS & DAMIAN MARLEY
"Who here likes to smoke weed?" asked Nas as he patrolled the cramped stage at Emo's. The answer: pretty much everyone. And while the smoke might have been thick as the Queensbridge rapper and reggae crossover star rattled through a medley of each other's big hits and teasers from their perpetually delayed collaborative album, Distant Relatives (finally due May 18), their performance was sharp and on-point. Nas dominated with a faithful rendering of "Made You Look," off his 2002 album, God's Son, with a retro-feeling sample of Onyx's 1993 single "Slam" tossed in for good measure, while Marley -- backed by only a DJ and hand drums -- revisited his father's classic, "One Love."
But the stripped down set best suited Nas' "One Mic," which he blasted through backed only by hand drums played by renowned percussionist Leon Mobley. Amidst all the heavy metal and indie rock, it was a striking reminder of just how powerful hip-hop can be, especially when wielded by a master craftsman like Nasir Jones. -- PETER GASTON
BEST STAGE DIVE: HIGH ON FIRE
"You want some fuckin' metal?" Mike Pike, frontman for Oakland, CA, trio High on Fire, asked a packed crowd that included an uncanny number of towering, Hell's Angel-style dudes with shaved heads and skull tattoos. Clearly, it was a rhetorical question. But the award for rocking the hardest goes to a waifish model, who leapt onto a stack of amplifiers onstage, threw the devils horns and headbanged, then slipped, fell five feet down into the pit, and crowd-surfed over a clawing mess of sweaty bodies, screaming, Fuck yeahhhhhhh!. – WILLIAM GOODMAN
Kitten / Photo: Eric Nowels
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Strange Boys / Photo: Matt Kiser
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French Resistance / Photo Kyle Dean Reinford
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MOST PROMISING 15 YEAR OLD: KITTEN
Sometimes the buzz around a new band with a teen singer is the hype of novelty -- and sometimes it's something more. Los Angeles' Kitten, fronted by 15-year-old Chloe Chaidez, put on a genuinely exciting show of darkly-inflected pop at the tiny venue Submerged. Chaidez, looking like a cross between pouty Divinyls' chanteuse Christina Amphlett and your favorite dorky cousin, has a raw power and believability as a performer. You can't quite take your eyes off her for fear of missing something, and her vocal style, while unpolished, is unpretentious and affecting. When her band got cranking, especially drummer Max Kuehn, I felt an honest chill of discovery. Kitten plans to drop an EP soon and is being scouted by the majors. The band's promise is undeniable. Honing their talent without homogenizing their rough originality will take finesse and patience, and could be well worth the effort. -- Mark Bautz
BAND MOST IN NEED OF A MOVIE CAMEO: CODEINE VELVET CLUB
Attention Quentin Tarantino: Codeine Velvet Club should be in your next movie. The Glasgow, Scotland, offshoot of the Fratellis' leader Jon Lawler would fit perfectly in the background of any party scene you could imagine, pumping out their alternately spooky and boldly theatrical tunes. And when the camera finally finds them for their close-up, Lawler's flowing Jack-White-like curls and his lively female co-singer's crisp tartan mini and pinned-back sophisto-'do are more than movie ready. In short, these guys look great and their music wins you over. Just when you think they're bit players in someone else's film, you discover they've been the real stars all along. -- M.B.
BEST SOLO FACE: PRIESTESS
Overzealous guitarists? Hardly. This esteemed award goes to the Montreal metal band's drummer Vince Nudo, whose face worked overtime during the quartet's set at the Mohawk. As Nudo laid anchor to the thrashing epics off their SPIN-praised new album, Prior to the Fire, his mug had a new action and shape for each drum roll – and there were a lot of drum rolls. He chewed, grinded and glinted his teeth, smiled, spit, frowned, curled his lips, grunted, and sometimes just sang along. Occasionally he reeled it in for frontman Mikey Heppner and lead axeman Dan Watchorn to trade solos. But despite the deft guitar action, it was clear who was the show's star. -- WG
BEST UP-AND-COMING BAND: THE STRANGE BOYS
Imagine Pete Doherty's Babyshambles playing a set of Black Lips covers and you get the Strange Boys, an Austin, TX, quintet -- drums, bass, two guitars, and a frizzly-haired girl on saxophone -- who kick out a charmingly ragged mix of swinging R&B, Nuggets-era garage rock, and weirdo roadhouse-blues. Sullen-eyed ringleader Ryan Sambol sang in a slurry talk-mumble as the band banged out the tinny-sounding tunes from their latest album, Be Brave. The Strange Boys are putting a strange new twist on garage rock – and I'll be standing front-and-center at their next show. -- WG.
BEST PIXIE-ISH PIXIE CHICK: THE HAPPY HOLLOWS
Sarah Negahdari looks like the girl who busted the curve in your high school algebra class, and then squeakily apologized for it, but put a guitar in the Happy Hollows frontwoman's hands and she shreds. The L.A. trio's Autumn Tone Records showcase was all shouts, smiles, yelps and guitar licks, capped by her finger-tapping freakout on the song "Lieutenant," which sounds like something off Surfer Rosa taken to a thrash-metal hoedown. Remember the very first time you heard the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Yeah.
-- KEVIN BRONSON
BEST TAKEDOWN (S): EVERYBODY WAS IN THE FRENCH RESISTANCE… NOW
Eddie Argos, whose hilariously wry narratives put U.K. quintet Art Brut on the map, played his first proper U.S. show with his side project sporting a hilariously unruly name, Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now. All the songs on the band's debut Fixing the Charts are rapier responses to famous tunes -- it's rather dance pop-meets-beat poet, really. The likes of Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Elastica and Avril Lavigne get smacked down, but the song from which the band name is derived, "Creeq Allies," didn't go over so well on an overseas tour. "In Europe, when you open with a song about Nazis, you get different reactions." Argos said. "Of course, when we were in Switzerland, we sang 'Everybody was in the French Resistance … except you people.' That didn't go down too well." -- KB
