First, a complaint. And not even a novel complaint: Can’t people in D.C. just loosen up and dance—a little? Hercules and Love Affair opened for Gnarls Barkley last night, and they put on a set that could have been epic in another context, but fell a little flat through no fault of the band. They just needed a different audience. Listening to the brainchild of Andy Butler on record, it’s a little hard to imagine the band being a real dancefloor killer—it’s disco (not death disco or punk disco or Italo disco, but disco disco), but it’s icy and a little bit evil-sounding. Where was the warmth going to come from? Those fears were allayed immediately, though, and the band played banger after banger, starting with “True/False, Fake/Real” and working their way through much of their record, notably blog hit “Blind” and the breathtaking “You Belong.” And no one really noticed.

Granted, the band was opening on this tour, and it’s to be expected that most people in the audience might not know a band that’s only been getting reasonable American distribution of their debut album for a little over a month, but come on. There were ten people on-stage last night, two of them whose sole job was to dance on speakers. There were dueling vocalists Nomi and Kim Ann Foxman going higher and higher (no Antony Hegarty, who sings on the album, but c’est la vie) and sexy synth lines, and a killer horn section to top it off, and people were sitting down. There were at least ten different moments when the club should have exploded, when the band built and built and built something only for it to reach it’s peak and . . . nothing from the audience.

Dance music needs dancing, people. There’s something to be said for the idea that all music is communal, an interplay between creator and listener, band and audience– Jeff Tweedy said as much in Wired a few years ago, and it’s not like there’s an urgent necessity to bust a move during “Ashes of American Flags.” It would seem that it’s more vital for dance music than for anything else, though. Dance music has a purpose beyond just being—it’s supposed to make you move,and you moving sends energy in to a live set, which sends energy back to you, back and forth in some sort of sweat-drenched hall of mirrors. It doesn’t work if you don’t dance.

Gnarls Barkley’s set worked out better, thankfully, as nobody needs dancing when Cee-Lo Green’s charisma is filling the room. The whole band was tight, and Danger Mouse played his musical Dr. Frankenstein role well, cobbling together something stunning from disparate pieces. It was Green who was the star, though. Declaring himself “Sexual Chocolate” at the end of the set, he earned all accolades, real or imaginary, plowing through material from the band’s two records like he was in a pulpit at a punk show. His vocals on “Transformer” were unreal, as he reminded everyone that soul music means Otis Redding and not Adam Levine. Of course, the band played “Crazy,” and of course, the crowd went appropriately wild. “It’s probably the one you’ve heard the most,” Green said completely unnecessarily before he went in to it.

The real highlight, though, came during the encore. Tucked between gospel dirge “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?” and show closer “Smiles” “Smiley Faces” was a little song called “Reckoner.” “Reckoning.” By Radiohead. Damn. The delicacy, the paranoia, the power—everything from the In Rainbows track was still there. It just came with Green’s wail instead of Yorke’s warble. Let’s not take anything away from Radiohead here—no one’s saying it was better, necessarily—but one must acknoledge that Green could probably front any band on the planet effectively. Anyway, the club blew up, and while it wasn’t quite consolation for all the times it should have and didn’t earlier in the evening, it was nice to see some acknowledgment for what was a pretty jaw-dropping moment. Maybe there’s hope yet.

For those of you not standing on-line right after work so you can get the best seats for the midnight showing of The Dark Knight: Tonight at Jammin’ Java, Jenny Owens Youngs will be playing sweet songs about love and longing. And maybe stripper poles. Seriously, go listen to “Voice on Tape” (featuring Regina Spektor) and “Fuck Was I”, and imagine the possibilities of hearing that haunting beauty and Nelly. Be there at 7:30 p.m., $10 in advance, $12 at the door.

God, I miss At the Drive-In. One day in tenth grade, I went to a record store in North Carolina and bought two records: Parachutes by Coldplay and Relationship of Command by At the Drive-In. I thought one of the bands was nice enough, but that the other one was going to be huge—I just picked the wrong one.

I mention this only because At the Drive-In is really the last band I unequivocally loved that just sort of rocked, you know—swerved and screamed and shredded for no reason but to do it. And Black & White Jacksons remind me a little bit of that, which is indeed a Very Good Thing. They don’t really sound like the El Paso band, but they flail and wail like them a little bit. Delusions about acts like these becoming the biggest band in the world are gone now, of course, which is why it was a little weird seeing them last night at a place as wide open as Fort Reno.

Let’s be clear: Black & White Jacksons is a band for clubs. This speaks not to their appeal, realized or otherwise, but to their aesthetic—they make sweaty post-punk that finds its natural habitat in dank buildings with low ceilings, barely there stages, and bright lights. Fort Reno, for those who haven’t been there, is essentially a giant field, with a stage in the center. A few years ago, Q and Not U packed in enough bodies to sort of make it seem like a tiny club, but the crowd last night wasn’t quite at that level. So, playing to the picnicking crowd at about dusk, the band had their work cut out for them. They delivered in an intriguing way, perhaps moved by a certain reverence. “In the punk rock circles I traveled in, Fort Reno was looked at by us as something akin to Woodstock—only more community driven, sustainable, and inclusive,” says bassist Lucas Oswalt.

The four-piece is tight and loud—think a Dischord-bred Bloc Party—and while I’d imagine their stuff comes across gloriously claustrophobic in a crowded room, it mutated a little bit last night as it had more room to move. The band opened up with “There Are No Foxholes In An Atheist,” the first track from their EP, and never really slowed down, just allowing the last song to linger in the vast space before chugging in to the next one. Whereas this modus operandi might make songs seem to be falling all over themselves and into each other at, say, Asylum (where they’ll be playing August 29), in the open air each track sort of reverberated individually. Most of their set came from their EP, with “Don’t Bring A Knife To A Gunfight” hitting especially hard (complete with tambourines) and “Id Vs. Superego” providing a respite from the shouting as Michael Medlock switched from his usual scream-singing to singing-singing. The band also played a new song called “Marvin Berry.” The “Johnny B. Goode”- sounding riff at the beginning of the song fueled suspicion that the title was a reference to this, and Oswalt confirmed it, saying “Tim [George], our guitar player, had this fantastic riff that he would play on occasion at practice, and to us it sounded very akin to something Chuck Berry would play. Tim has an encyclopedic knowledge of music and is quick to acknowledge ‘the greats,’ if you get my meaning. We just kept referring to that riff and the developing song as ‘The Chuck Berry Song.’ So yeah, the title is a reference to Michael J. Fox’s performance in ‘Back to the Future.’ It’s probably my favorite song we perform right now.”

Medlock shimmied the whole night through (and his neon bracelets finally shone once the sun went down), and he got the kids at the show to do the same (there were twelve people on stage dancing at the end, by this count). This, incidentally, is probably the most fascinating part of the whole event: the sheer number of high school and college aged kids who showed up to the Tenleytown venue. Sure, there were some parents and toddlers and more than a few dogs, but the vast majority of the audience was comprised of kids who looked like they were glad to actually be able to see a show.

“It was great having younger people in the audience really getting into it,” Oswalt says. “We’re used to playing smaller places with less people, which obviously creates a different experience because it’s nighttime, and you’re usually playing to a pretty non-diverse demographic. Seeing dogs and little kids running around while hammering away on my bass under moonlight was both unusual and refreshing.”

There’s a lot of live music in the District, but a lot of it isn’t all-ages, and one gets the sense that this dearth is what drives a lot of Fort Reno’s traffic (that and, you know, that it’s free and it’s nice out during the summer). God bless the volunteers who run it. In any event, that’s an issue for another day, because no matter what the reason, the clubs of DC were brought outside Monday night, to satisfying effect.