For Real Estate’s Martin Courtney, returning to his native New Jersey  last summer after graduating from college may have been a regressive move, but it also turned out to be a productive one.

“I almost exclusively hang out with people from high school these days,” the singer and guitarist says, echoing that common post-collegiate experience of hometown dive bars and procrastinated job searches.

But Courtney also spent last summer writing songs and jamming in his parents’ basement with guitarist Matt Mondanile, bassist Alex Bleeker, and drummer Etienne Duguay, laying the groundwork for what is, little more than a year later, one of 2009’s most promising new indie-pop acts in a year replete with lo-fi fast-burners. Six months after its first gig, Real Estate—which plays at the Rock & Roll Hotel tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian—was generating buzz at the South by Southwest festival in Austin and tickling the blogosphere with woozy, summery singles. Now, the band is about to release its self-titled debut on Woodsist Records.

The pitfalls of blog-fueled, late-oughts meritocracy aren’t lost Courtney, who says he doesn’t expect Real Estate to break down, Wavves-style, anytime soon. “A couple months ago, that really worried me and freaked me out,” Courtney says. “But due to circumstances beyond our control”—intermittent access to a recording space and, later, a problem with the finished album’s test plate—”our record got pushed back. Now there’s been time for shit to cool off. I hope that now it’s less of a buzz thing and more that we’re just a band that exists.”

That music critics and bloggers have covered Real Estate almost as long as it has existed has been “a little nerve-wracking,” Courtney says. “It’s kind of annoying when people ask us if we spend a lot of time on the beach.”

He says songs like “Beach Comber” and “Atlantic City”—as well as the band’s tropical, laid-back vibe—can’t be chalked up to a strategy or ethos. They’re simply the result of a summer spent writing music by the ocean. Seeing his band boiled down to one-sentence narratives and minute-old labels “can be frustrating,” Courtney says. “You cringe a little bit. But I’m starting to realize that some people that write about music just need something to clutch on to as a reference and to make it clearer.”

Courtney says he’s somewhat vexed by Real Estate’s reputation as a lo-fi act—a distinction undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that several more of his high-school classmates, Julian Lynch and the guys behind the Underwater Peoples label, have also released nostalgic-sounding records that are heavy on tape hiss. “If we could record in the studio, I would do it in a second,” Courtney says. The Real Estate album, out on Nov. 17, “has definitely got a demo vibe. I think it sounds good for sure, but it’s not a choice we made to sound that way. It’s just the way it is.”

Real Estate performs tonight with Japandroids and Neon Indian at the Rock & Roll Hotel at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance, and $12 at the door. Photo courtesy of Real Estate’s MySpace page.

It’s likely no accident that, at least on cursory listens, Psychic Chasms (Lefse Records) sounds out-of-time and incidental, like the gauzy score to a local-access television spot long relegated to the backwaters of YouTube. Certainly, there’s a degraded and lo-fi quality to this debut by Neon Indian, the project of 21-year-old Alan Palomo, who is based in Austin. That hissy, washed-over aesthetic is essential to the 30-minute album, but unlike the other glo-fi acts the blogosphere slobbered over all summer, Psychic Chasms has a productive tension between sound and songwriter.

The latter doesn’t always win: As background music, Palomo’s songs disappear into a staticky haze. Pay attention, though, and you’ll hear sunny, synthy outsider pop that distills everything good about Hall & Oates and The Avalanches, even as it unravels their lessons.

Neon Indian performs with Japandroids and Real Estate at the Rock & Roll Hotel on Oct. 19 at 8:30 p.m. Tickets are $15.

Experimental hip-hoppers Anti-Pop Consortium were at their incomprehensible best at Rock & Roll Hotel this Saturday, performing a set heavy on tunes from their recent reunion album, Fluorescent Black. It was a welcome return to form for a group that has seen its individual members involved in a huge number of side projects after APC’s breakup in 2002, none of which were as satisfying as APC itself.

More photos after the jump and at the full gallery.

Openers Pants Velour, who put on a fun set but whose party-ready hip-hop was an odd fit for this bill:

Full gallery here.

There are two questions Sacramento, Calif.’s Ganglians say they’re asked all the time: Is the band named after ganglion cysts? (Those are gross and kind of cool, frontman Ryan Grubbs said Tuesday, but no.) Also, what’s it like to trip on ayahuasca?

Grubbs said he loves talking about psychoactive drugs almost as much as taking them. But he and his bandmates have never ingested that particular one, which is hard to find outside of South America. (Not that he wouldn’t, he said.)

“We definitely talk about acid experiences a lot,” said Grubbs, whose band opens for Wavves tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel. “I think it was Rob [Enbom] of Eat Skull who told some guy from The Agit Reader that when we were on tour with him we were finding psychoactive stuff along the road like ayahuasca and ingesting it.” Which is true, Grubbs said, except for the ayahuasca part. “Our bass player Adrian [Comenzind] is a botanist. He’s like the hippie of the group.”

Well, more like the hippiest. Grubb’s openness about drugs isn’t particularly shocking, unless you’ve never seen the band (young, spaced out, and mostly bearded) or heard its latest record, Monster Head Room (out now on Woodsist), which isn’t so much the latest iteration of this decade’s freak folk as it is a direct tapping of poppy ’60s psych acts like The Millenium and Love.

There’s one final ingredient, according to Grubbs: The Beach Boys‘ radiant vocal harmonies. “If you’re ever at the point [in an acid trip] where you’re hearing angel voices,” he said, “we definitely try to replicate that.”

Around the time Ganglians recorded Monster Head Room, Grubbs said, “there were a lot of mushrooms and acid, but we didn’t take it and record stuff. I would just take it and come up with ideas. Mainly we would just smoke weed. And we haven’t had a chance to do it lately.”

When you’re on tour, Grubbs said, “you have to be on the ball.”

Which is still a challenge, to hear Grubbs tell it. The band was detained last week by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while trying to cross into Canada for a gig. They were held for several hours, Grubbs said, after a border agent discovered rolling papers in bassist Comenzind’s wallet. The entire time, Grubbs said, he was high from a pot brownie: “It was totally insane, like Nazi Germany.”

Grubbs is both an exhilarating interview subject (he is enthusiastic and utterly without guile) and an amusing one. Several times during our phone conversation, he asked me to repeat a question even though he already had spent several sentences answering it. (To be fair, neither of our phones had great reception.) When he told me that Monster Head Room is a coming-of-age epic structured like an acid trip—”it has a climax, it comes down, there’s the second climax and it comes down at the end”—I asked him what the post-bildungsroman Ganglians will sing about next time they record an album. Has the band cornered itself into adulthood?

The question puzzled Grubbs, and excited him. He said he needed to talk to the band about it, and get back to me. “Can I text you the answer later?”

I have yet to hear back.

Ganglians perform tonight at the Rock & Roll Hotel with Wavves and Tennis System. Photo courtesy of Ganglians’ MySpace page.

Read the full City Lights pick here. Deets below the jump.

Soulsavers with Mark Lanegan
With Jonneine Zapata and Red Ghost
At the Rock & Roll Hotel, 1353 H St. NE. $15–$18. (202) 388-7625.

Tonight’s show in the venue’s main space, sponsored by Instrumental Analysis, is all about big hooks and singalong choruses: Area favorites Jukebox The Ghost are headlining , and the piano poppers say they’ll be testing out some new songs. And John Davis’ (Q And Not U, Georgie James) power-pop outfit Title Tracks, whose debut drops early next year, should have some fresh material to show off, as well. And in the upstairs bar, All Our Noise sponsors a free dance night with DJ sets by Micah Vellian and Outputmessage.

On Saturday, the pendulum swings from ra-ra rock to artier (or least idiosyncratic) pop, with an early show headlined by D.C.’s Death By Sexy, with local support from Meow vs Meow and Dj Doc Rok. Out-of-towners Starlight Mints (one of the few bands I’d describe as psych-twee) and Gringo Star also will play sets. Show up early and there’s free PBR(!). Stay in the same space after that, and queer dance nights MIXTAPE and Taint are teaming up all Voltron-like.

Full deets for the six events after the jump:

Friday, Aug. 14 | Jukebox The Ghost, Title Tracks, Bellman Barker, Tereu Tereu, and John Thornley from U.S. Royaly (DJ set) | Rock & Roll Hotel downstairs | 8 p.m. | $14 | 18+

Friday, Aug. 14 | Flat Out! featuring DJs Michah Vellian and Outputmessage | Rock & Roll Hotel upstairs | 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. | free | 21+

Saturday, Aug. 15 | Death By Sexy, Gringo Star, Starlight Mints, Meow vs Meow, and Dj Doc Rok | Rock & Roll Hotel downstairs | 6:30 p.m. | $10 | 18+

Saturday, Aug. 15 | Garutachi! dance night with DJ Austin, DJ Ca$$idy, DJ Fabiana, and JHN RDN | Rock & Roll Hotel upstairs | 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. | free | 21+

Saturday, Aug. 15 | Queer dance night with MIXTAPE and Taint | Rock & Roll Hotel downstairs | 10 p.m. | $8 | 21+

Sunday, Aug. 16 | D.C. Beer Week opening “Unity Jam” with See-I, The Blackjacks, Laura Tsaggaris, and Jeff Wells | Rock & Roll Hotel downstairs | 2 p.m. doors, concert at 4 p.m. | $10 (plus $20 for beer tasting) | 18+

I spent much of the last two years writing movie reviews, and I had just one ethical guideline for my morning press screenings: Don’t take the food. So how should I have reacted when Tobacco, the frontman the costumed, dancing hype man of the acid-caked post-rockers Black Moth Super Rainbow shoved a stick of warm string cheese into my hand last night at the Rock & Roll Hotel?

It turns out the Pittsburgh quintet—more performance art than post-rock, really—thrives on blowing up expectations. The venue (quite full for a Sunday) seemed primed for something more studied—understandable, given that on record Black Moth Super Rainbow’s verve and heavy use of Vocoder can suggest something out of the Battles playbook, with all the attendant influences. Live, though, the group was dancier, pithier, and freakier, as much flower-child bliss-out as art-school iconoclasm. Not just once was I compelled to abdicate my journalistic distance.

That abandon went for the audience, too, whose members quickly went from nodding their heads to shaking their tails. Decked out in a frayed gorilla costume and what looked like a bearded Bob Dylan mask, Tobacco the dancing furry emerged early from behind the projection screen blocking the rest of the band, and bolted into the crowd. There he largely stayed, hugging, grinding, and gifting with chocolate whomever crossed his path. Once or twice, he grabbed audience members and motioned for them to make out; other times, he whipped the peppiest attendees into a mosh pit. Like an art-damaged Jesus, Tobacco Gorilla Dylan sometimes fell onto the ground crucifixlike. And during the encore, he pulled a large chunk of the crowd on stage (good memories abounded). In other words: This did not look like your daddy’s post-rock.

It didn’t sound like it, either. In a watery and robotic voice, frontman Tobacco sang about heavenly bodies and forests and love while the rest of the group pumped out funky, heaving rhythms and blissful analog synthscapes. Black Moth Super Rainbow has opened for The Flaming Lips, and recently recorded with its producer Dave Fridmann; it was probably no accident that in pulsing songs like “Zodiac Girls” and “Sun Lips,” the group seemed to share the Lips’ crunchy aural texture and winking experimentalism.

The video projections were something far more homespun, but their presence said much about Black Moth Super Rainbow’s performance-first-band-second M.O. Full of frolicking goths, oozing bodily fluids, and Sesame Street puppets from other countries, the videos looked like faux snuff films with a smile, cracked Appropriation art from the YouTube backwaters. Between the acid test on the screen and Tobacco Gorilla Dylan rocketing across the floor, the effect was sheer sensory overload.

And yet, all the visual stimuli meant that the sounds coming from the stage sometimes felt incidental. Or at least that’s what I concluded afterward; during the show, my ecstatic brain barely produced a thought.

Good thing, then, that a short opening set by Dan Friel, who also sings and plays guitar in Parts & Labor, was a slightly more academic affair. Fiddling around a case of cables, pedals, Christmas lights, a drum machine, and a Hammond keyboard, Friel seemed to exhume infectious, high-register melodies from the ghost of Metal Machine Music, like Brian Eno mischieviously soundtracking home videos of his kids. Noisy and layered, Friel’s music had the effect of an orchestra of broken computers and midis.

Strangely, both acts make music that sound hard to get on paper but fans find easy to love, a paradox not lost on Black Moth Super Rainbow. Before its set, the group screened a short film featuring clowns with knives in the first act and Brian Posehn (seriously) in the third. But the second part sent my pen flying fastest: a fake YouTube rant in which a self-appointed commentator laid out a list of his five least favorite bands. Topping the countdown, of course, was Black Moth Super Rainbow. “It just sounds like they’re making music for printers,” he moaned. “You must be a complete douchebag to listen to this music.”

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed

Somewhere between stellastarr*’s self-titled semibreakthrough and Civilized, its latest, self-released effort, the New York band went from benign and enjoyable indie bubblegum to disposable Guitar Hero rock. That much was clear, anyway, at the group’s packed show at Rock & Roll Hotel Friday with Wild Light and The Postmarks. Here is a band that long has inspired easy dismissal, and after three albums seems to have ironed out all idiosyncrasy. The crowd—rollicking, fist-pumping, high-fiving—couldn’t have asked for anything more.

I don’t mean to sound flip. In 2003, stellastarr*’s debut was derivative, sometimes involving stuff that—with its blatant debt to Talking Heads and Pixies—arrived during exactly the right moment of post-punk and college-rock revival. That album’s singles, “Jenny” and “My Coco,” were mainstays of my iPod for months. So I was somewhat nonplussed when stellastarr*’s hour-plus set Friday produced no Proustian flashback to younger days.

In older numbers, frontman Shawn Christensen resurrected the yodeled take on Frank Black’s barking by which stellastarr* first made its bones, but he slipped comfortably into a nasal, pop-punk whine for the group’s recent material. Civilized was a perfect descriptor. Bland, power-pop hyperbole—the stuff of soaring choruses, bah-bah refrains and meaningless couplets—proved the order of the night.

In other words: I should have taken my own advice and seen Lovvers.

II. I Saw Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Future And It Is Fucked

If the headliner inspired few deep thoughts, then Wild Light, the groomed New Hampshire band who played second but took nearly as much time arranging its gear, was infuriating. On record, a shimmering California vibe dominates proceedings (although one song repeats “fuck California” with grating self-congratulation), but live it was a more bicoastal affair: the pleadingness of latter-day emo; New Romantic Killers-style synthscapes; the E-Street Band’s large sound/salt-of-the-earth dichotomy. “Earnest and ambitious” reads the group’s promotional material, which, in a pejorative sense, is exactly on point. Vocals reverberated; synths swooped; glasses clanged; girls screamed (already the young band has groupies). By my count, only one song didn’t end in an arena-ready cadenza.

(Reverb obfuscated most of the lyrics; those that penetrated were postcard aphorisms and milquetoast ramblings about small towns and The Road.)

I’m not sure that Wild Light has the hooks to land it on, say, Grey’s Anatomy (though Rolling Stone begs to differ), but its members certainly have the Abercrombie looks. Guitarist Jordan Alexander The Rebel Heartthrob was all tattoo sleeves, skinny jeans and earnestness-with-an-attitude; his warbling, plaintive vocals by turns suggested All-American Rejects‘ emo-pop and Bon Jovi’s heartland-derived pinup rock. For his songs, multi-instrumentalist Timothy Kyle The Blue-Collar Auteur was serious in black, and affected a crooning Brandon Flowers baritone. Drummer Seth Kasper The Drummer was the least photogenic, though there was much to admire in his Spectorian (or Max Weinberg-ish?) flourishes. And Seth Pitman The Blond One, also a multi-instrumentalist, telegraphed condescension with each banter. At one point, he thanked The Postmarks—whom he said he “had never heard of” before the tour—for opening, and encouraged the crowd to “get their CD or something.” Well, thanks, dude.

III. A Farewell To Barbs

Miami’s The Postmarks didn’t match the crowd-bating energy of their tourmates, but for all their sophistipop iciness, they had the most heart. Often, the five-piece complemented chanteuse Tim Yehezkely’s girly deadpan with a chunky, robotic post-shoegaze; softer songs balanced finicky tweeness with infectious, Motownesque bass hooks. It’s no surprise or accident that Ivy’s Andy Chase gave The Postmarks their first career boost; Yehezkely & Co. share Ivy’s polish, understatement and erudition.

Then again, The Postmarks’ set closer, a cover of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Nine Million Rainy Days,” was anything but polite: In it, Yehezkely was less Liz Phair than Bilinda Butcher, an ambient angel amid the violent, echoing maelstrom.

Photo by Benjamin R. Freed

I’m going to hazard a guess that during yesterday’s music-packed evening in D.C., the only show that could rival Peter Brötzmann’s trio in intensity was The Dillinger Escape Plan at Rock & Roll Hotel. If you’ve seen DEP before or you read my writeup of their Baltimore show this past Feburary, you know the drill.

R&R Hotel had a few security guys lined up in front of the stage to try to keep control. I asked one of them if they knew what they were in for. “Oh yeah, we know all about it,” came the confident reply. The thick padding taped over the venue’s giant wall mirrors, and the ceiling above the stage, seemed to confirm this, but the “NO STAGE DIVING / NO CROWDSURFING” signs posted everywhere were overly optimistic.

Photos and a few more thoughts after the jump. Full gallery here.

I suppose the show was relatively tame by DEP standards—Rock & Roll Hotel has no pillars for people to climb and jump off of, no balconies for band members to scale, etc.—but being in the crowd still felt like hanging on for dear life in the middle of a violently depressurizing airplane. The band willfully ignored the restrictions on stagediving and crowdsurfing (though in retrospect, I didn’t notice any audience members following their lead). Their fog machine quickly filled the venue with a thick haze, and since the Hotel doesn’t exactly have great ventilation, the room became ridiculously hot and after a while I wondered if the fog machine was even still needed or if evaporating sweat from the frenzied crowd was having the same effect.

Musically, DEP seemed to be in fine form, although the sound sucked up front so it was sometimes hard to tell. Still, it was good enough that there were some obvious highlights, like the classic “43% Burnt,” and a surprise appearance of DEP’s Aphex Twin cover “Come to Daddy.” I was a bit disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any new material played, which was surprising given the band will be recording their new album next month.

But setlist nitpicks are just that—nitpicks—and all that really mattered was that DEP whipped themselves and the crowd into a sweaty delirium for 70 minutes.

Full gallery here.

Which brings us to tonight, when Rodriguez will perform at the Rock & Roll Hotel with, through some unexplained but welcome fluke of fate, certain members of local avant-brass band Gestures. Yeah, The Thermals are playing too, over at Black Cat. But look, Rodriguez has been in the wings for some thirty years to bring his songs to his own country. The Thermals, on the other hand, will probably show up again next month. Hear tonight what the people of Australia already understood decades ago.

Video after the jump