Ponys The Fiery Furnaces Constantines The Fever Electric Six Mission of Burma: This is Not a (very good) Photograph

I got to Coney Island early (it's hard to judge those five-hour drives down from New Hampshire), with plenty of time to check out the surprisingly nice boardwalk and beach, have a cholesterol-packed lunch and even get my feet wet in the ocean. An elderly gentleman sitting on the bench next to me struck up a conversation, telling me about coming to Coney Island with his aunt as a child. I asked him how dirty the water was out here, and he made the very New York observation that it was, after all, the same ocean as the one in East Hampton. Well, fair enough, but it had a much more democratic feel to it, packed already with towels and shrieking kids and families -- and a lovely thing it was in the hazy heat of late July.

But I wasn't there for the beach, so I headed down to the main stage to see Chicago's Ponys play an early set. The Ponys' Laced With Romance is one of the best debut records I've heard this year, bursting with pop-into-punk energy and riding the dual vocals of Richard Hell-like Jered Gunmere and deadly cool Melissa Elias (who also plays bass). Guitarist/keyboard player Ian Adams looked country-club fresh in an Izod shirt, while Elias hid behind a mass of dark curls and seemed maybe a bit unwell. (It was still pretty early by rock band standards.) Jered, blond and lanky like a young Thurston Moore, jumped as jerkily as The Ponys' melodic lines, as the band rattled off happy, twisted album cuts like "Let's Kill Ourselves", "Little Friends", "10 Fingers and 11 Toes" and "Look Inside a Mirror". On the band's darkly satiric "Love You Cause You Look Like Me", Adams picked up what were Elias's vocals on the record, which reminded me that the last time I saw The Ponys, she didn't sing, either. That's too bad, because her vocals are one of the best things on Laced With Romance -- and without her, the band didn't even attempt "Chemical Imbalance", my favorite album cut. They did, however, do a cover of the Dolls' "Chatterbox", with Adams and Gunmere trading herky-jerky vocals and staccato guitars and hardly able to contain their grins. The set closed with an unfamiliar song (at least to me), but one that ended in an extended instrumental break, all feedback and drone and frenzy, unexpected but fun anyway.

Next up were The Fiery Furnaces, drawing a big crowd on the heels of their crammed-to-the-margins psych-rock-theatrical Blueberry Boat. Their new album is a complicated thing, a work best appreciated with headphones, tranquility and a lot of thinking time. It did not translate particularly well, I thought, to the blazingly hot, indifferently mic'd setting at Coney Island, though there were moments -- the opening snippets of "I Lost My Dog", a verse snatched from "Blueberry Boat", odds and sods from "Leaky Tunnel", "South Is Only A Home" and "Chris Michaels" -- that captured the band's manic, over-the-top excitement. Their live set, if you haven't seen it, is a continuous half-hour ride, built out of bits and pieces of songs from both albums, spliced together in ways that sometimes work and sometimes don't. Because of middling sound, it was often impossible to hear much except Eleanor's vocals. The ironic and complicated accompaniment of keyboards and synthesizer was often lost in the mix, which flattened out the sound quite a bit. Still, every few minutes the band broke out into one of those crazy riffs -- that falling-off-a-cliff synth from "Leaky Tunnel" or the glorious guitars of "Chris Michaels" -- and it would all make sense again. Ironically, as they were playing, The Cyclone roared overhead, hitting the same kinds of heady heights and precipitous drops as the band on the stage.

And, speaking of the Cyclone, at 3:00 p.m. I had planned to meet Holly Anderson, co-lyricist for Consonant (she also wrote the words to Mission of Burma's "Mica" and "What We Really Were"), to ride the Cyclone. So there I was, sitting on the curb, nursing a bottle of water, wondering what she looked like and whether she'd come, when a smallish blonde woman in a big sun hat approached and said, "Are you Jenny?" A few minutes later we were seated in a narrow wooden car as the roller coaster cranked to life. "Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked -- a little late, I thought, but there was no turning back. The Cyclone, for those of you raised on high tech metal and polymer roller coasters, is kind an old-fashioned thing, a great wooden serpent of a ride, rising hundreds of feet in the air so that you can see the beach and the park, then plummeting recklessly down. It coils in and around itself, so that you make two or three orbits around it without ever taking the same track twice. It clatters and shudders and lifts away from the tracks as only a wooden roller coaster can, but, I repeated to myself silently, it must be safe or they would shut it down. (Because NYC is so vigilant about people's safety, don't you think?) And, when it's over, you can ride again for four rather than five dollars. We didn't. I think Holly was disappointed.

Back to music. The Constantines were up next on the second stage, so I persuaded Holly to give them a shot. It was getting a lot more crowded by this point, so I found a spot right up against the chain fence on the far left hand side of the stage. Holly mentioned that she thought she had a VIP pass coming to her, and would I wait right here while she went to check. This turned out to be sort of like that childhood game we used to call snipe hunting, when you tell someone to wait right here while you flush out the snipe, and then leave. I never saw her again, although, to be fair, it was a zoo and hard to find people. And anyway, I love the Constantines, who played what I thought was a great set, all hoarse passionate vocals and angular slashing rhythms and that thing where their hands are all up, pounding the sky in time at the end of "Shine a Light". By this point I had stopped taking detailed notes, but I do remember a searing version of "Howling at the Moon", dedicated to the band's home town, Toronto, and a slow and mesmerizing "Nighttime Anytime".

I left right after the Constantines to try to catch a little of TV On the Radio, but couldn't get within a quarter mile of the stage and turned back. I was at the second stage in time for The Fever, who seemed to have an ardent following, but I just wasn't feeling their hard rock into disco sound. After they'd finished, The Electric Six came on, easily the best surprise of the day. I'd heard "Gay Bar", the jokey single that launched a thousand remixes, of course, but that didn't prepare me for how good this band was. Taking the stage in suits (it must have been 90 degrees, at least), they proceeded to rip the hell out of the stage with their frenzied punk/garage/disco sound. I'm not familiar with the band's work at all, so I'm not ready with track titles, but if you get a chance to see them, do it. I do know that they closed with "Gay Bar", and it was the best song of the best set of the day. Every so often, singer Dick Valentine got a big goofy grin on his face and waved like he'd just spotted his best friend from grade school. I looked out over the crowd and saw a hundred grinning hipsters waving back. It was beautiful.

And by that point, it was almost time for Mission of Burma, which, really, was the whole reason I'd driven 250 miles to Coney Island. I was uncoolly, unreasonably excited about the whole deal, starting when the roadies wheeled out Roger Miller's ancient amp (it had a big hole in the front and what looked like mildew on the sides) and began to set up the soundproofed booth for Peter Prescott's drums. The band was almost giddy, too, snapping pictures of the crowd and clearly god-damned happy to be there. "Somehow back in 1979, we knew we'd be playing Coney Island today," cracked Prescott, "And we also knew that your Yankees were going to lose." And there, in the heart of Yankees country, where a Red Sox cap marks a man for death, not a single soul booed. The set drew mostly from this year's OnOffOn, hitting highlights like "Wounded World", "Nicotine Bomb", "Falling", "The Set-Up" and Prescott's great punk tune "The Enthusiast" (and, yes, I was very psyched, but not, unfortunately, high). Mixed in, though, were some of Burma's best-known songs -- "This Is Not a Photograph" got the crowd going early, "Trem Two" fed Versus addicts, and "Academy Fight Song" and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" tore the roof off. The regular set ended with "That's When I Reach for My Revolver", unfortunately marred by a dead mic on Miller's side, but still a great, great song. The band closed with a Wipers cover -- "Youth of America", I think -- one ass-kicking, complicated, long-overlooked punk band covering another. So, you may be asking, when are we going to see The Wipers at Siren? This year has proved that anything is possible.

Article and photos by Jennifer Kelly