Thievery Corporation will be playing three nights at the 9:30 Club. This is becoming a January tradition for the classy, dubby duo. They will be spinning their haunted downtempo tunes on Jan 21, 22, and 23. Tickets go on sale Thursday at 10 a.m.

The 9:30 Club hosted a local-ish metal blowout on Thursday: Lamb of God (Richmond), Darkest Hour (D.C.), Periphery (Bethesda) and This or the Apocalypse (Lancaster, PA). The seriously high-energy performances were matched by one of the most active, enthusiastic crowds I’ve ever seen at a D.C. show.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Darkest Hour:

Periphery:

This or the Apocalypse:

Full gallery here.

It’s one thing to write a break-up record. But recording it while your ex looks on?

“The songs were an actual communication, because he was very present,” says Sarah Assbring, referring to the recording sessions for Love Is not Pop, her latest album as El Perro del Mar. She built a studio in Gothenburg, Sweden, several years ago with her then boyfriend, and although they broke up over a year ago, he’s still the sound engineer. “He was more or less looking me in the eye while I was doing the vocals.”

Awash in echo and atmosphere, Love Is not Pop is a remarkably spacey album for an artist who cut her teeth making sweet, sad, girl-group-sounding indie pop. Lyrically, though, the record is grounded. When Assbring sings lines like “We’ve been together for so long/I gotta get smart” and “It is something to have wept as we have wept,” she says, she means every crestfallen syllable.

Assbring—who opens for Peter Bjorn and John tomorrow at the 9:30 Club—says it’s no accident that Love Is not Pop’s title lends itself to several interpretations.

“I wanted to communicate that way of reading it differently, depending on what kind of state of mind you are in,” she says. “I was facing a new love, and at the same time my old relationship was dying, so in that sense Love Is not Pop made total sense to me. At certain times I felt that love is everything but pop. Which sometimes is true, and sometimes it’s not true.”

She wrote the record last summer in Paris, and says she always thinks hard about the complexities of placing certain words together: “I want to write pop songs but not necessarily simple love songs.” Perhaps conversely, she also writes quickly. “The heart and soul of the lyrics are the most important thing, and if I overwork it then those things are lost.”

Assbring’s first two records, El Perro del Mar and From the Valley to the Stars, were Spectorian and economical—twee yet downcast takes on classicist popcraft. But for Love Is not Pop, she tapped producer Rasmus Hägg of the Swedish dance duo Studio, with whom she crafted a more sophisticated sound with hints of minimalistic, Balearic-style disco.

That meant compromise, something that Assbring, who owns her own studio, wasn’t used to. ”One of the first things I said to Rasmus,” she says, “was that I wanted to move into a more synthetic sound.” But Hägg, in turn, said he hoped to move away from electronics. So they recorded the album using almost only analog instruments and tweaked them electronically afterward.

For Assbring, the evolution is striking. “I tend to react to things I’ve done previously. I knew pretty quickly after I did the last album I wanted to do something dramatically different,” she says. “I need to have some sort of mysterious element that is hard to put your finger on. I wanted to take my music into a place that was even more hard to distinguish.”

There’s an intentional strangeness to the record, Assbring says, one reflected in the video for the first single, “Change of Heart.”

The clip features the Golden Power, a bronzed gymnastics duo from Hungary who balance on each other in seeming slow motion. The video’s director, Filip Nilsson, first saw the Golden Power perform at the Lido music hall in Paris, “and he was totally just fascinated by it,” Assbring says. “He got hold of this clip, and at the same time he was very into my single, and he just couldn’t let it go. He sent me a test of what it would look like, and I couldn’t let it go, either.”

For Assbring, the moment was as serendipitous as a quickly and perfectly conceived lyric. ”It was also this instant thing,” she says. “It just went really well with the weirdness and the mystery.”

El Perro del Mar performs with Peter Bjorn and John tomorrow at the 9:30 Club at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. Image courtesy El Perro del Mar’s MySpace page.

What a difference a year makes: last December, Swedish death metal icons In Flames were blown off the stage by their opening band (Gojira) in Baltimore; last May, North Carolinian prog-metallers Between the Buried and Me played to a disinterested audience of Dream Theater fans at DAR Constitution Hall. On Monday at a packed 9:30 Club, BTBAM satisfied a crowd full of fans screaming, “You guys should headline this tour!” while In Flames more than matched BTBAM, with exponentially more energy than they had at that Baltimore show last winter.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

In Flames:

Between the Buried and Me:

3 Inches of Blood:

The Faceless:

Full gallery here.

• On fame and the media: “We were hanging about in Little Hulton doing fuck all before this happened. Sometimes I’d have to go and steal potatoes off people’s doorsteps. Now there are articles about us saying that we’re in Los Angeles unavailable for comment. I think that’s pretty funny.” [The Observer, March 17, 1991]
• On the beginnings of Madchester and the Hacienda club: “Everyone in the place was on E and it made us look better and sound better. I know they were all on E because we used to go out in the audience selling E like T-shirts.” [The Independent, July 7, 1991]
• On recording The Happy Mondays’ 1992 album, Yes, Please, in Barbados: “We were in the studio for a total of three months. I was supposed to be writing, but instead I got into all the local niceties, like water-skiing and paragliding on crack. I had no idea what I was doing.” [The Independent, Oct. 5 1992]
e were hanging about in Little Hulton doing fuck all before this happened. Sometimes I’d have to go and steal potatoes off people’s doorsteps. Now there are articles about us saying that we’re in Los Angeles unavailable for comment. I think that’s pretty funny.
• On paying The Mondays’ dancer/mascot, Bez, for a short 1999 reunion tour: “We got him down to pounds 500. Well, pounds 500 and a free T-shirt.” [The Independent, Feb. 6, 1999]
• On being clean: “It’s great. But it is freaky. I don’t know whether it’s all the rearranged molecules cos of the methadone, but I went through some kind of godly experience. It was pretty mental. It should have been on the Discovery Channel.” [The Guardian, Feb. 25, 2007]
• On the film 24 Hour Party People, which depicts Happy Mondays and other Manchester bands: “It was a load of bollocks, right? It was entertainment, it wasn’t a true story – which I’m glad about. The script that I first saw, when I said I didn’t want anything to do with it, was gangsters, guns and drugs, right? When me and Bez wouldn’t get involved with it, they decided to concentrate on Tony Wilson and it became a vehicle for that fucking comedian [Steve Coogan] to do a bit of acting. I watched it and yeah, to me, it was entertaining, but it wasn’t real.” [Expletive Undeleted, May 12, 2009]

Photo courtesy of Happy Mondays’ MySpace page. Happy Mondays perform with Psychedelic Furs and Islands tonight at the 9:30 Club at 7 p.m. Tickets are $35.

Read the full City Lights pick here; deets below the jump.

Between the Buried and Me performs with In Flames
The 9:30 Club
815 V St. NW
(202) 265-0930
6:30 p.m. $25.

Considering the group only has one full-length album to its name, Ra Ra Riot brought an impressively enthusiastic audience to a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. The Syracuse indie-pop sextet put on a show better than its album would lead one to expect—the hour-long set was just enough to leave fans wanting more.

Photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Maps & Atlases opened with a bit of very enjoyable proggy indie-rock:

Princeton were the first openers:

Full gallery here.

The Sounds frontwoman Maja Ivarsson doesn’t need the hot pants and high heels that are her trademark schtick: she’s a dynamic, engaging performer regardless of what she’s wearing. The energy that she brought to the 9:30 Club last night more than made up for a few vocal misfires.

Quote of the night: “Oh my god, don’t you just want to have sex with them?” from an enthusiastic female fan to a 9:30 Club staff member.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Gratuitously large full gallery here.

Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, of Hoboken, N.J.’s Yo La Tengo, are married. Despite the rumors, Matt Johnson and Kim Schifino, better known as the Brooklyn band Matt & Kim, are not.

At Matt & Kim’s sold-out show at the Black Cat Wednesday, Schifino showed off what has to be indie pop’s most expressive face, while Johnson—with his Von Trapp good looks and overstimulated banter—spent half of the band’s hyperactive set pogoing on his stool. No drums-and-keys duo is more animated and entertaining, nor more modest, nor more, well, annoying. The set was all minute-long brat-pop nuggets and synthed-up arena themes (”Rock And Roll Part 2,” “The Final Countdown,” ODB’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”), and the crowd (youngish) ate it up. As for me, it was hard to begrudge Johnson and Schifino their success: They were too adorable.

Kaplan and Hubley (along with their bandmate James McNew) offer little in the way of body language. A shared smile and a quip from Kaplan after the couple forgot the lyrics to a Beach Boys cover (”Farmer’s Daughter”) was about all the physical rapport on display at a sold-out 9:30 Club last night. Here was a headier affair, and a nerdier one: Yo La Tengo opened with an acid test (”Here To Fall”), continued with 10-plus minutes of deep drone and blissed-out harmonies (”More Stars Than There Are In Heaven”), dug deep into its repertory (covers of Black Flag and Half Japanese), and even deeper into its celebrated discography (I counted a half-dozen crowd-pleasers, give or take).

Its indie cred and noisy propensity notwithstanding, Yo La Tengo has long nurtured a profoundly poppy sensibility while just as often thriving on repetition; their best songs—of which the band played quite a few last night, including “Autumn Sweater,” “Tom Courtney,” and “Sugarcube”—combine those impulses. To wit: Yo La Tengo’s may be the smartest take on record-collector rock.

For “Avalon Or Someone Very Similar,” from Yo La Tengo’s new Popular Songs album, the trio scrapped the studio version’s Bacharachian sheen, favoring noisy economy. In “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House,” meanwhile, the group hewed closer to the original’s cool, sophistipop reading. Even during its most consciously unintellectual songs—like “Periodically Triple Or Double,” which sports the lyric “I never read Proust/seems a little too long”—Yo La Tengo appeared less like a band playing its material than one thinking about it out loud. Once or twice, that meant longish, slow-building songs best consumed in solitude, not in a packed club. Most of the time, it meant a nearly perfect Yo La Tengo show.

If Yo La Tengo demands patience and rewards it with smart pop, Matt & Kim make music for short attention spans—think loud drums, farty bass lines, carnivalesque melodies, and infectious choruses about nothing in particular. At one point Johnson, who plays keyboards and sings, told his giddy audience that “Daylight,” from the band’s recent album Grand, is the most meaningful song he’s written. Its chorus goes like this: “In the daylight, I don’t pick up my phone/cause in the daylight anywhere feels like home.” Would that we all had it so good.

Photo from Brando Wu’s (really awesome) set. You can listen to the complete Yo La Tengo show at NPR.

Jon Fischer will be recapping last night’s Yo La Tengo show at the 9:30 Club. In the meantime, check out some photos from the evening after the jump and at the full gallery.

The next four photos, plus the headline shot, are all from the awesome, lengthy Ira Kaplan guitar freakout that is “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.”

Full gallery here.