New Colossus, Old Music Festival Feel

When the CMJ music festival abruptly stopped in 2016, New York City lost a pretty fun week for people who wanted to see many good and young bands without having to go far. With an entry badge ($149 for the whole week), you could hop around from venue to venue, dispersed through mostly Lower Manhattan, and hear up-and-coming bands thirsting for exposure. 

It was a fun way to run around the city and feel like you might stumble onto your new favorite band—CMJ was certainly a bit too music industry-adjacent and over time, increasingly corporate, but its end was still a loss for the city's music scene and smaller venues. Besides the now-defunct Northside Festival in Brooklyn, there really haven't been many attempts to recreate what was, from the outside, a pretty great idea for a festival—get a few local venues on board and basically keep the music going all day as bands roll through town. 

That is, until the New Colossus Festival, now in its fifth year, came along. The festival, which focuses on mostly international groups (with a few U.S. bands thrown in) and takes its name from the Emma Lazarus poem etched on the Statue of Liberty, kicked off last night in the East Village and Lower East Side. The festival will continue through the weekend at venues across lower Manhattan—some newer spots, like Baker Falls, some older like Pianos and Arlene's Grocery. 

Last night at Baker Falls, you could find a showcase of bands from Montréal, fresh out of touring vans or off flights and trying as hard as possible to stick to the half-hour time limit imposed by the New Colossus organizers, alternating songs in English and Québécois.

Éliane Viens-Synnott is the lead-singer of the extremely fun punk outfit La Sécurité, whose first New York City show ever was Wednesday night's performance. Viens-Synnott told Hell Gate that it's tough for foreign bands to play in the U.S right now—New Colossus helps with that, and like others appearing at the festival, the band's next stop was SXSW in Texas. 

"It's kind of the only way for Canadian bands to come and play in the States for now, if you don't have a visa. It's really complicated to get a visa and it's really expensive," Viens-Synnott told Hell Gate. 

You can catch La Sécurité at Baker Falls again tonight, or at Pianos on Friday. 

New Colossus runs through Sunday—badges are $150 (like CMJ!), individual shows cost less, and if you don't have weekend plans and want to commit yourself to hearing new music, we can't recommend it enough. 

Some less cool links to start your day: 

• Despite the Port Authority and NYC's Economic Development Corporation spending millions on infrastructure to allow cruise ships to plug into power lines on the shores of Red Hook, cruise companies instead choose to spew noxious pollution over neighboring communities. A new City Council bill would force them to hook up to shore power.
• Remember when the City cartoonishly got rid of a bunch of popular school lunch items because kids liked them too much? Whoops, sorry about that, they're coming back.  
• A searing investigation into New York's broken guardianship program.
• New low-income housing isn't being built in wealthier neighborhoods (thanks to the Bloomberg administration basically making it illegal to do so). 
• IBM fired back at the City after City Hall blamed them for the remote learning system crashing during last month's snow day. 
• "What's up, Queens?" RIP, Buddy Duress. 
• I'm not in favor of the death penalty, however, we recommend it for all involved. 
• Scamming the scammer? Now we're talking. 
• The City is spending more money to send migrants away than it spends on the office meant to welcome them here. 
• Landlords are not super keen on taking City money to fix up rent-stabilized apartments and get them back on the market. 
• Popular Open Streets are running into cash problems. 
• The bill making landlords pay broker fees inches forward. 
• "I potty-trained my pet pigeon—now I treat her to NYC’s finest restaurants, cool parties and Uber rides"
• And finally, don't listen to her, just go to a different entrance: