CMJ‰’s schedule is full of tiny bands playing half a dozen shows each in an effort to get noticed by college radio stations and blogs and to interface with promotional companies. However cool these bands may try to appear (and I watched two separate bass players try to pull off wearing sunglasses indoors, so these bands are definitely trying), deep down we all know they are desperate for attention. They want to quit their day jobs, they want to get a powerful promo company to support their next release and they want to be the band that breaks out of this year‰’s conference. For every Sleigh Bells or Surfer Blood, there are a hundred bands that will play CMJ and never get anywhere, and part of the experience of the conference is watching these bands put everything into a performance that will get them nothing and this is very sad.

There were a few established bands who showed up to appease their labels and promo companies who brought out the opposite emotion in me; watching a relatively large band play like they don‰’t expect anything magical to come of their set is invigorating. A Place to Bury Strangers did this for me when they played a full set at Brooklyn‰’s Union Pool during the Dead Oceans/Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar showcase on October 19.

The band has released two albums and are prepping a third for 2012; their first album blew them up into one of the country‰’s biggest noise-rock acts, mainly because their concept of “noise-rock‰” does not end with “our guitarist has a distortion pedal and the vocals are buried in the mix.‰” They make loud and brutal music in an indie landscape full of acoustic guitars and ironic covers of R&B songs. I skipped putting the band‰’s self-titled debut album on my iPod for the first few months after it came out; I was afraid I would be minding my own business in “shuffle‰” mode and then, suddenly, a track like “To Fix The Gash In Your Head‰” would jump out at me and destroy my ear drums.

When A Place to Bury Strangers took the stage, they did so directly after the loose, by-the-numbers pop of Gauntlet Hair, a band whose between-song stage presence was littered with nervous laughter and down-turned eyes. Wearing leather jackets that would quickly be shrugged off in the heat of the small venue, A Place to Bury Strangers opened their performance with a new song that began and ended in dissonant blasts of feedback. For the first twenty minutes or so there were no house lights to speak of and the band was lit only by films being projected onto the stage.

“Cool‰” is hard to quantify but easier to pinpoint when directly juxtaposed with “awkward.‰” Gauntlet Hair may one day find a way to perform live, but you stack them against a professional band like A Place to Bury Strangers and it‰’s hard not to see the silliness in all of their affectations. (For reference, Gauntlet Hair‰’s MySpace page was created two months after A Place to Bury Strangers‰’ most recent album came out.)

Over the next hour and twenty minutes, A Place to Bury Strangers played almost exclusively new material. I only recognized two songs, “Ocean‰” and “She Dies,‰” but the unreleased cuts were strong enough that this never became an issue. The new material still shows off A Place to Bury Strangers‰’ chief influences (The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division), but the new songs seemed more focused on melody than what we‰’ve come to expect from this band. There have always been strong hooks in the music, but they‰’ve usually been buried under heavier layers of haze than the ones the band was showing off at the showcase that night.

The ambience of the show was also held in stark relief against the bands performing earlier in the showcase. Most bands don‰’t have a look, and while there isn‰’t anything wrong with that at all, it really blows you away when a band can nail its presence the way A Place to Bury Strangers did. The projector continued throughout the show and, maybe twenty minutes in, singer/guitarist Oliver Ackermann began to sporadically set off a smoke machine. By the band‰’s last song the smoke was so think in the small venue that the projections began to show up on the wall of fog between the musicians and their audience.

Halfway through that last song, Ackermann triggered a strobe light and the visual overload, mixed cleanly with the ear-splitting noise, made the show a capital ‰e‰’ Event in a schedule full of good bands lacking visual aesthetics. Enough care goes into every part of A Place to Bury Strangers‰’ live show that you don‰’t want to look down to check the time or skip a song in order to buy a drink. They know what they‰’re doing.