Hurricane Sandy couldn’t hold back the NYC Craft Beer Festival Winter Harvest this year, but it did certainly find a way to delay it. Moving the date back nearly one month to December 1st, as well as pushing the location across town, the organizers were presented with the opportunity of bolstering up beer supply and bringing in a few additional selections for sampling. Along with that, the Festival collected canned goods and other products to go towards the relief of Sandy victims.

Just the other night, DJ Shadow’s set at Miami nightclub Mansion nightclub was cut short when the promoter told him his music was “too future” for the crowd (check out the video on Facebook). However, the week prior, no one had any complaints when Shadow rocked the Brooklyn Bowl with his ‘All Basses Covered’ DJ set. Shadow was happy to be back for his second show at the venue and in support of his new compilation Reconstructed: The Best of DJ Shadow that was just released. This set compiles the lengthy career of Shadow’s and follows a few rarities releases he put out and his tour, from the end of last year, off the back of his album The Less You Know, The Better.

Maybe the set was too confusing since it didn’t include stuff entirely from Shadow’s own work but Shadow did preface his set (in NYC) that a lot of the stuff wasn’t available on an album currently. He did mix in his track with Little Dragon “Scale it Back” early on his set and he fervently worked his drum sampler as he performed “I Gotta Rokk” from the newer album, and he mixed in a bit of the classic “Organ Donor”, but the majority of his set was off the record.  The intelligent and eclectic mix kept the audience on their toes, trying to grasp at the songs and the samples. One of the recognizable highlights was his funky and futuristic rework of The Simpsons theme song. It was truly a unique set that highlighted Shadow’s turntable mastery. And then shortly after, he gave the New York crowd a taste of Bay-area music with some hyphy-flavored song.

The monthly NEXT Charity Concert series has hopped to a different venue in recent months, now at Captain Lawrence Brewing Company, but it continues to bring talented, smaller bands out in support of various charitable efforts. November saw the Brooklyn band The Stationary Set perform to a small audience inside the brewing facility, nestled in between pallets of beers. The members of the Set are Andrew Lutes (lead vocals) Logan Baldwin (drums), the most wild Joshua Hoisington (keys), Gabriel Kubitz (bass), Josh Davis (guitar). The day happened to mark Gabriel Kubitz’s birthday, which led to several rounds of applause for the fellow throughout the night.

PopMatters writer Joe Vallese spoke to Marina Diamandis ahead of her show at Terminal 5 in New York and his class field trip to the concert. The sold out show was teeming with youths who knew all the words to the pop star’s tunes, excited for every one of them. The high energy, short set from openers Icona Pop got the audience warmed up for the equally high energy main draw.

I will admit that I’m a bit disappointed that Of Monsters and Men’s track “Little Talks” was not far higher on the PopMatters Best of 75 Songs of 2012 list. I wrote the little blurb there thinking the band was gonna be HUGE on people’s lists. In fact, I only had Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids” ahead of “Little Talks”. But so it goes. In the final tally, “Little Talks” only achieved #62 while Frank Ocean reached #3.

I found Of Monsters and Men in the early part of 2012, after they had broken through into the US via the radio of all things. I was happy to catch them in April (Music Hall of Williamsburg; capacity 550) and then again at the end of summer when MTV Iggy had them perform as the first concert in their “Music Experiment” putting them on a vaudevillian style stage and in a setting that harkened back to the ‘30s with circus performers and aerial acrobatics. A clip from that event follows: