CMJ: Alex Winston\'s Mother Likes What She Sees

Alex Winston said onstage that her mother was seeing her perform for the first time at Santos Party House on Tuesday night at CMJ. Maybe mom was proud; the crowd offered the appropriate roars of recognition for the handful of songs Ms. Winston performed.

Since 2009, Ms. Winston has made her way from singing other people's songs, on a free download EP, to singing her own songs on a major label, and she has found a formula.

That would be an anthemic, military-tinged march beat, a wordless vocal line of “oh,” “ah” or “nyah-nyah” that might be doubled by a glockenspiel, and a lyric that touches on a cultural or religious hot button - one is “Velvet Elvis,” about caressing a portrait, and another is “Sister Wife,” referring to Mormon polygamy and telling her rival, “Get the hell out, it's my night.”

It's a proud, bratty self-absorption, which she acted out in performance by descending, for much of her set, from the stage into the audie nce, where only those nearby could see her. The rest heard a voice that aimed for the operatic but ended up merely shrill.