“Brooklyn Rocks!” Festival Rolls Greenpoint

Friday night’s installment of “Brooklyn Rocks!,” a new independent music festival, would not fit many Greenpoint concert-goers’ ideas about what an indie concert in Brooklyn looks like. There were no skinny jeans. There were no retro synthesizers. There was no thrashing. Popular unsigned Brooklyn bands these days often have all the outward maturity of a student driver, so by comparison, most of the performers Friday night looked venerable. About the only thing the “Brooklyn Rocks!” concert series had in common with most Brooklyn indie shows was that it was loud and behind schedule.

Red Star, the festival’s home base, is also a somewhat surprising bar, given its location. One might expect a venue at the very end of Greenpoint Avenue to be a dark, crowded cavern that sells a lot of PBR. Instead, the unusually bright first floor is essentially a sports bar with multiple TVs. And for a Friday night, there were unexpectedly few customers.

“Brooklyn Rocks!” is essentially a multi-night battle of the bands. Friday was the fifth of six consecutive nights of competition. In its first year, the competition is the latest project of Lee Sobel, a DJ and party promoter who has been working in New York since 1996. Sobel chose the bands after booking many of them in clubs around the city. “They have energy and a decent following,” he said, “but are still up-and-comers. That’s what I was looking for.”

Explaining his choice of venue, Sobel said the manager of Red Star was very cooperative and supportive, even going so far as to secure Budweiser as a drink sponsor for the festival. Sobel found all of this refreshing. “Most clubs are so bottom line-oriented, and often don’t care at all about the music,” he said. “Brooklyn is the epicenter of the indie music scene, so I wanted to take advantage of that. And because of the Greenpoint location, I knew bands would have to work a little harder to get people out.”

“Red Star has a very mainstream vibe,” he continued, “which appeals to me. I want to sell tickets. That’s my job. I’m not concerned with being on the outer edges of the envelope, so I don’t need some artsy place with underground people.”

The band that came on around 9pm was billed as Fortune Sellers, although their website calls them Frightened Seller. James Wilson, who sang and played electric piano, and Kari Bethke, who played violin, appeared without their usual drummer or bass player. Surprisingly loud for a duo playing traditionally classical instruments, their songs verged on musical theater. The Listeners, up next, were even louder. A guitar-drums-bass trio, they played good-humored, even slightly goofy, straight-ahead rock with plenty of breaks for long and showy solos from guitarist Ronan Conroy. A song with the chorus,
“Facebook! Facebook!” was an unanticipated highlight of the night.

The final “Brooklyn Rocks!” concert, which will determine the winner of the entire competition, will be held Saturday, December 13th. Two bands from Friday night, Karate Monkey Death Car and Mappa Mundi, will be performing in the finals, along with Sensory Assault, Gone to Plaid, Hope Gillmore and Maxwell’s Demon. “Each night of competition had at least two bands that really shone,” Sobel said. “But the bands that are going on to the final round are really motivated.”