Coral Moons wax and wane at Bowery Electric on Thursday, 7 March 2024.

Yo Diablo, Echo Kid, Jelly Kelly, and Melody Fields sandwich the five-stack festival lineup.

The New Colossus Festival played out from March 6-10, highlighting new sounds in underground music from here, there, and all points foreign and abroad.

New York City is a destination that international acts are going to set their sights on regardless. But the stakes were raised as the fest has fit itself snugly into the week before SXSW, attracting bands from all over who wanted to hopscotch through town on their way to more storied Texas festival.

The New Colossus wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and you wouldn’t either, trading between showcases at dives and clubs dotting an electric neighborhood in one of the most exciting cities in the world. Sights, sounds, food, drink, and lodging if you can afford it. Let’s go see some music!

The basement of Bowery Electric, a good spot to hear some underground sound. Some have compared the vibe to the old CBGBs. Is that so? Which decade? There are a few notes and accents dedicated to dramatizing Lower East Side grit & grime.

Otherwise, it’s smooth sailing for the straight arrow crowd. Solid PA, decent light show, and a bar above and below decks. Extra points for real flames in the real candles illuminating the bar.

Feels like a fire code violation. Feels like rock n roll.

Two hombres from Valencia, Spain. It’s Yo Diablo, which is Spanish for “old wooden ship” used during the Civil War era.

This band was a roaming, rhythmic pairing of guitar and drums. The six-stringer exercised some Dick Dale surf rock energy, with fingerpicking worthy of classical guitar stylings, and an instinct for the blues. The drummer kept the breakneck pace while his partner knob-fiddled with his pedals in the middle of songs to squeeze just a little more psychedelic raga flavor out of the electric juice boxes.

The Philadelphia band Echo Kid got the phone call just the day before. A Swedish black metal band dropped off the bill – did Echo Kid want to roadtrip it to NYC to fill the empty slot? Sure, why the hell not? You only live once, and you can split the gas bill between all four band members.

The net result was a hard detour away from metal, towards bright and bouncy indie rock. You could picture this band in a lineup with Drink Up Buttercup back in the day. One song had a distinctly Caribbean feel, but there was no steel drum in sight. Must have been some magic whipped up by the superb keyboardist.

A five-piece post punk outfit from Brooklyn with danceable rhythms and a kind of washed out David Byrne delivery on lead vocals. It’s Jelly Kelly, which is fun to say and read and write and and see and hear.

Shades of pop serialism in the key of Horse Lords, but more free & easy, less programmatic.

Apparently the band’s online identity was recently hacked. No worries, “NOW WE BACK!”

Each song had a real lived-in feel, with lots of dotted ‘i’s and crossed ‘t’s squirreled away within each measure.

And this band’s instruments were beat to absolute hell. You might have noticed that Sweden’s Melody Fields borrowed the bass for their set later in the night. Maybe that’s why the instruments are beat to hell. But axes are meant to be swung, not hung over the mantle, so it’s just as well.

Coral Moons celebrated the release of their new single “Shrooms” just the day prior. They rolled it out in front of the crowd in the basement of Bowery Electric, along with more than a few tracks from the 2022 full-length Fieldcrest. With a song title like that you’d expect a more granola crew. But the musical aesthetic was more pop than jam. These are tightly-crafted numbers. The vocals of Carly Kraft are too enamored with exploring their own peaks, vistas, and pastures to let improvisation from the backing band lead the way.

A psych jammer ensemble from Gothenburg, Sweden. Maybe this bill was originally meant to be a Swedish showcase, and every Swede fell off except Melody Fields? No proof, just wondering.

It’s hard enough to jump through all the political hoops to tour in America from abroad, never mind the financial and psychological burden of packing up all your shit and trusting the cargo hold of a commercial airliner. As mentioned above, their bass guitar didn't make the trip, so they borrowed one from Jelly Kelly.

There was no substitute to be found, though, for their missing keyboard player. Melody Fields set up the keyboard stand like the Chair of Elijah anyway, in case the wandering musician found their way through the door.

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