CMJ: A Storm in the Quiet

Karsten Moran for The New York Times The punk trio Metz, from Toronto, performed at the Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg on Tuesday.

Tuesday is the first of the CMJ Festival's five days and nights, and often the slowest. Plenty of bands and attendees haven't yet made it into town. Shows are often at less than full capacity. You can breathe. It's a good day to try to catch a band that, on Friday, might fill a room you wouldn't want to be squeezed into.

Unless that band is Metz, that is. Metz is a punk trio from Toronto that just released its roaring self-titled debut album (on Sub Pop). Tuesday night it was playing Cameo Gallery in Williamsburg as part of a bill sponsored by the listings website Oh My Rockness.

The show began on time - at least, that was the impression left on some latecomers, who were barred at the door, told the room was over capacity and the show half over. Certainly, the room was overflowing. A bouncer was pushing people back into the hallway that fed the small room.

It hardly mattered. The music - brawny, pugnacious stuff - was audible in the hall, and also in the restaurant at the other end of the hall. This is in part about venue choice: Cameo is a narrow choke of a space, with a big column near the middle of the room. It simply couldn't contain this band's energy, nor the abundant interest in it.

Once inside, Metz's impact was even more obvious. The singer Alex Edkins was vibrating at a serious frequency, aroused and rowdy. Together, the rhythm section - the drummer Hayden Menzies and the bassist Chris Slorach - was thunderous. It was , superfi cially, a real racket, but the winds inside the storm were all moving in destructive tandem. There certainly would have been moshing, had there been any room.