The 10 songs on Fang Island evoke power pop at its finest, with soaring guitar solos and sincere, wordless chants and the crackling energy of a packed arena. As the band's MySpace page aptly describes the music, it sounds like "everyone high-fiving everyone."

Needless to say, it was a bit strange when some of the more, shall we say, stuffy music critics began singing the band's praises this year. Perhaps those most surprised were the band members themselves.

"The music was made totally under the radar, it was made for a love of making songs, and it was made for the love of hanging out and playing music," says guitarist Nick Sadler. "Literally no one was watching and we didn't know what it was going to become."

The positive press comes several years after Fang Island began as part of a class project at the Rhode Island School of Design. Sadler wasn't in the band when it started: However, he did attend the Community College of Rhode Island as a fine arts student, vut dropped out to focus on grindcore noisemakers Daughters. Sadler's connection to Fang Island happened quite fortuitously.

"I ended up dating a close friend of theirs who brought me out to see them play and I made friends with these guys," he says. "One day they said they were looking for a third guitar player, and I really wanted that to be me. I pushed the issue quite a bit, and then that did happen."

The band members not only infuse their music with positive energy, but their personal lives as well. It's why Sadler wanted to be a part of Fang Island in the first place.

"I really wanted to hang out with these guys, because they were constantly having a good time all the time. They lived in this big house with all their friends, it was three stories and there were lots of parties," he says. "I was like, 'damn, I need to hang out with these guys, they have the right idea [of] how to have fun, and they all seem like really good friends. I just want to get involved with that idea.'"

Sadler & Co. have since taken that idea around the country and back again. Fang Island has been touring off-and-on since March, doing a fair number of solo shows and opening for groups like The Flaming Lips, Stone Temple Pilots, Matt & Kim, and Coheed & Cambria. The band is on the final leg of the tour—which will see them stop at the Rock & Roll Hotel tomorrow—tough the work won't stop when they get home: They'll be working on the next Fang Island album soon.

The group has been so engrossed in touring that its only recently found time to clean out the van. "It's kind of one of those things where we did not want to acknowledge how dirty it was," Sadler says. "We had a couple days off, and just sort of cleaned it out and got rid of all the crap that was in here. Food and cups of coffee, and just random things like fireworks and Halloween lights, who knows how many magazines and books, 20 pairs of shoes for no reason. Just weird shit."

Fang Island performs with Delicate Steve and The Black Girls tomorrow at 8 p.m. at the Rock & Roll Hotel.

It means that there's just one Blockbuster left in the District, at 410 8th Street SE, as DCist reported today. Beyond that, there are seven more video-rental stores in the District—for a total of eight, by our count, which isn't quite as dire as the figure of four that TBD came up with today. Beyond the Blockbuster, they are: two locations of Potomac Video; Lamont Video in Mount Pleasant; two Capital Video Sales on Connecticut Avenue NW and off 8th Street in Southeast; Royce's Video (specializing in adult, family and oldies) off Georgia Avenue in Northwest; and Woodner Video in Columbia Heights.

Blockbuster seems to be scaling its effort down to kiosks—why pay $5.30 for a video when a beer costs the same? Blockbuster currently has 23 kiosk locations within a 10-mile radius of the City Paper, with $1 daily rentals. Redbox, meanwhile  already has over 50 locations in the District in various grocery stores, 7-Elevens and McDonald's.

The main problem with those wonderful boxes? They mostly offer recently released films. As for Netflix and Amazon, they've got just about anything you want, if you don't mind waiting (or streaming). But there’s something sweet about being able to run to the store and browse films from the archaic to the new to the dreadfully awful. So the closing of any video store is a shame, even a Blockbuster. Or even worse, the shuttering of a place like Alexandria's Video Vault, which housed 60,000 titles and specialized in cult films. It closed this spring.

Photo by Jonathan L. Fischer.

Never actually seen the Hope Diamond and yet it still looks eerily familiar? It's the inspiration for the Heart of the Ocean diamond from Titanic, replicas of which have been adorning the necks of women of indiscriminate taste everywhere since the release of the film.

Perhaps wearing a Hope Diamond replica is better than wearing the real thing. "We would never take the Hope Diamond because it's bad luck," said Jessica Barakat of Crown Pawnbrokers on 14th Street. "If the replica were made of cubic zirconia, we would probably only pay about $100 for it. A diamond is forever, CZ is not."

Details on the materials used to produce the Hope Diamond replica are not yet known. However, according to QVC spokeperson Erin Mulholland, the Smithsonian collection will include such stones as garnet, topaz, and Bisbee turquoise. The collection will be available this fall and prices will start at $85–within reach of all you fashionistas with diamond tastes and semi-precious budgets.

Photo courtesy of visitingdc.com

The

"I've never watched The Real World before this year," said Will Whitney, a Takoma Park native and the drummer for Real World cast member Josh Colon's band, Wicked Liquid. "But I hear it's huge in the Midwest, so that's where we are going to try to tour."

At a premiere party at Tattoo Bar last night, Wicked Liquid, which has recorded a four-song EP and played one show, said it hopes that interest in the band will grow as The Real World airs.

Whitney hooked up with Colon about halfway through the Real World's filming this summer, at a Capitol Skyline Hotel pool party, where the half-Italian, half-Puerto Rican heartthrob grabbed the DJ's mic and freestyled poolside. Afterward, he and Whitney hatched a plan to make a band.

"I explained to him, basically, my style and what I was going for," Colon said. "I said punk and I said hip-hop and I said rap, and [Will] put it together, auditioned them in front of me, and they did great."

Tapping friends and former bandmates, Whitney created a group that Colon christened Wicked Liquid. (Colon's former band, in Philadelphia, was called Whiskey Living.) "We know we didn't make the first three episodes," said Whitney. But the band, including guitarist Fasil "Fuzzy G" Girmey and bassist Ben Martinez, is holding out hope it will be featured later in the season. Though the members may not be as camera-ready as The Real World cast, Whitney said, the group certainly has a lot of personality.

"Ben is, he is just one of the funniest people alive. Fasil is super hardworking; he is a character too," Whitney said. "I wish we could have our own reality show; it'd be funny."

Camera crews recorded the band's practices and "there was some friction" that might interest drama-hungry viewers, said Whitney, who is not allowed to elaborate on what that friction entailed.

In the meantime, Whitney and his friends are working hard to position themselves for whatever publicity might come their way. Their EP will soon be available on iTunes, they recently created a MySpace page and blog, and a Web site is in the works. They are also working with booking agents for that Midwest tour. And, at the premier party last night, they lapped up local press, posed for photos, and conducted interviews behind velvet ropes.

They didn't, however, appear to sell many CDs. But Whitney said he isn't concerned that his frontman's fame will overshadow the band's tunes.

"Any attention is good attention in this industry. And I think the music is good enough that people will pay attention to it, too," he said.

It's your last chance to meet the D.C. Real World cast before it ascends to the plane of reality celebrity. The Real World premiere party is tonight at Tattoo Bar, and for just $5.00 (or $20, for "VIP" access) you can watch the premier alongside cast member Josh Colon. Of course, if you're an aspiring hanger-on, you're too late: Real World filming wrapped in October, so your make-out session with sultry Ashley will never air. However, party attendees will be treated to the (unintentionally?) retro sounds of Colon's band, Wicked Liquid, whose EP will be pumping through the sound system.

THE REAL WORLD PREMIERE PARTY TAKES PLACE TONIGHT AT TATTOO BAR, 1413 K ST. NW. (202) 408-9444. 9 P.M.  $5-$20.

If folk music’s prime currency is authenticity, Langhorne Slim might well earn some crooked eyebrows. Classically trained at the SUNY-Purchase conservatory, Sean Scolnik donned loafers and floppy hat and named himself after his hometown in the tradition of all those rail-hoppin’ ramblers who used to do that. The blogosphere gobbled up this aesthetic and and have cast Slim in the role of Guthrie-Dylan inheritor he came dressed to play.

Really, Slim doesn’t make music like that at all. His music is much more poptimistic, with an evangelical energy that has led some critics to call his music religious (and not in the way Bob Dylan equated Woody Guthrie’s music with religion). Slim's lyrics lunge, albeit passionately, with a blade that is shinier than it is sharp. Cat Stevens, with his spiritual conceit, is an apter analog—or the Avett Brothers, with whom Slim has toured.

The irony, of course, is that once Langhorne Slim is amputated from the Guthrie-Dylan continuum the question of authenticity ceases to pose a problem, and we can appreciate Scolnik for what he is: An upbeat kid with a folk-gospel bent who makes dynamic, non-threatening, thoroughly enjoyable pop music.

Langhorne Slim plays tonight at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel with Dawes, left-coast country rock act whom Rolling Stone last week certified as “breaking,” and who occasionally go Steinbeck all over their blog. Doors at 8 p.m.; $12-$14.

On Daisy, Brand New is still providing soundtrack material for countless unwritten bildungsromans, the kind set in suburban high schools, dorm rooms, and first apartments, and which feature protagonists who didn't have it rough growing up, and don't have it all that rough now, but who, deep down, would rather feel pissed off for no reason, than feel, you know, just so so.

Incidentally, Brand New front man Jesse Lacey has implied this might be it. If true, Daisy's glumness and cacophony are both a touching coda to the group's own confused youth (fighting with other bands, bitching about neurotic fans, living on Long Island) and a melancholy disclaimer that adulthood does not guarantee equilibrium. (Lacey still lives on Long Island.)

To that end, Daisy is loud, simple, and–with 11 tracks clocking in at 40 minutes–short. Thematically, it contains the same cathartic accusations and dense but intuitively satisfying metaphors as 2006's The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, which I listened to obsessively while recovering from one friend's suicide and another friend's attempted suicide, all the while feeling that Lacey's melodramatic lyrics were about characters whose experiences were somehow worse than my own.

Mega-suffering takes a slightly different form on Daisy. For instance, the line, "I'm a preacher without a pulpit," from the title track,  doesn't make sense at first. Brand New has the 16-24 demographic pinned down like a bull walrus during mating season, and it's difficult to imagine why, or in what way, they feel like no one's listening to them. But plenty of their fans, especially the ones who are maturing into the music (as opposed to growing too old for it) probably feel this way once or twice a day, even though their parents and friends/significant others are likely listening to them more than they realize.

Such melodrama probably gave rise the term "emo" being used as a pejorative, but for my money, blowing psychological speed bumps into trenches beats happy-go-lucky any day of the week.

If you've never dug Brand New, or if you've never listened to them based solely on their reputation, this album is a great place to start. It's punkish and sonically mature. Especially good music for night drives, overtime at the office, or whenever something bad has happened to you and you need a little help emoting to your full potential.

Stream Daisy at Brand New's Myspace.

According to one Nick Green, "Screamo bands covering Top 40 songs [is a] full blown epidemic." He's right: Lil Wayne. The Fray. The Postal Service. The Knack, for Christ's sake (personally, I love that last one–it's good background music for shot-gunning 16-ounce Natty Lights). In an ongoing special over at Decibel's Deciblog, contributors put 16 screamo covers head to head in what will go down in history as the greatest Mallcore bracket ever made.

In the opening salvo, I played Drop Dead, Gorgeous' cover of "Swing" against I Set My Friends On Fire's (pictured above) cover of "Crank Dat Soulja Boy."  In the same post, Axl Rosenberg of Metalsucks (featured in Amanda Hess' column this week) measured Brokencyde's cover of Flo Rida's "Low" against A Static Lullaby's cover of Britney Spears' "Toxic."

New brackets will be posted throughout this and next week (today's post features a screamo cover of Santana's "Smooth" so insipid that I spread the mustard in my mouth), so check back often!

Your sacred cows mean nothing.

That, at least briefly, was the message of Los Campesinos! last night at a packed 9:30 Club. "I never cared about Ian MacKaye," sputtered Gareth Campesinos!, the Cardiff, Wales-based group's frontman, in "The International Tweexcore Underground," surely aware of the lyric's particular application. Not that the audience — whose average age couldn't have exceeded 18 — noticed or cared. Throughout the evening it returned the septet's considerable panache in triplicate, pogoing and mouthing along to each sarcastic word, even when the group's schoolyard accents and entropic arrangements swallowed the vocals whole. Energy overpowered attitude, and for a while, that was fine.

Though the group played many of its "rubbish older songs" — as Gareth referred to numbers still less than three years old — the members are clearly starting to get over the knowing cocksureness of their early recordings. "I've got so many witty retorts," Gareth proclaimed at one point, but refrained from dispensing them because, he said, his hecklers were unamplified (for Los Campesinos!, context is everything).

The band has released two well-received albums since its 2007 EP, Sticking Fingers Into Sockets, carefully honing its dichotomous sound — which pits thick guitars and distorted bass against whispy strings and gurgling synths — along the way. But the lyrics are another matter. Once Los Campesinos! sang about bands you surely know and mixtapes and the absurdities of twee culture, reveling in the blend of irony and insiderness with which young lyricists often mask a lack of confidence. Coupled with Gareth and Aleks Campesinos!' bratty inflections, it was really, really annoying stuff. I miss it dearly.

The less immature Los Campesinos! (I hesitate to say "more mature") concern themselves with matters of the heart rather than the mechanics of hipster cachet. In "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed," Gareth sang "I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love / is to like the other slightly less than you get in return / I keep feeling like I'm being undercut," which on paper is a much more satisfying lyric than "Sarah Records never meant anything to me / but the International Tweexcore Underground will save us all." But twee pop is one of the few genres (along with hip-hop) that can thrive on self-reference, in its case the more cloying, the better (think Tullycraft). Which is to say: Los Campesinos! should be in no hurry to grow up. In this era of bromances and the elevated fart joke, they are our brat punk.

And for all their too-cool-for-schoolness, Los Campesinos! are clearly a band of fans: How else to account for a jagged cover of Pavement's "Box Elder," or the unmistakeable influence of the U.K.'s post-C86 generation (particularly bands like Heavenly or The Pastels)? Likely, it was no accident that the two bands that opened — Chicago's Smith Westerns and San Francisco's much-buzzed Girls — fell just as easily into categories of record-collection rock.

For reasons too boring to explain, I missed most of Smith Westerns' set, but what I did hear reminded me more of, say, T. Rex than the  Vivian Girls or Crystal Stilts vibe I get from their very lo-fi album. And Girls, who didn't do much for the crowd but whom I mostly enjoyed, summarized dozens of reference points — from Johnny Thunders' booziness and The Raspberries' ebullient heartbreak to the Laurel Canyon scene of the late '60s — into druggy, delay-heavy come-down pop. It was exactly the stuff you'd expect from a songwriter who grew up in a cult. And I was prepared to drink the Kool-Aid myself, right up to the final song of the set, whose chorus went “Love is everything I need," soon followed by “kissing and hugging is the air that I breathe.” Maybe singer Christopher Owens, shaggy and rail-thin, was being earnest. But I sensed contempt.

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed

From tonight's pick by Caroline Jones: "One part kitsch, one part political satire, and one part glitter, the Kinsey Sicks, describe themselves as “America’s Favorite Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet.” The group returns to D.C. on Saturday night with a new set of parodies, skewering everyone from Condoleezza Rice to Vanna White. What began 15 years ago with four guys attending a Bette Midler show dressed as the Andrews Sisters is now an off-Broadway revue that’s traveled around the country and the world."

Read the entire Kinsey Sicks pick for details.