As far as hometown shows go, Bishop Allen could've done a lot worse. The band mostly pulled songs from 2007's excellent album, The Broken String as well as from a yearlong project in 2006 wherein they released an EP every month. On the record, the songs are light and poppy, generally a breeze to listen through. The live show allowed for a few more rock and roll indulgences—muscular guitar parts here and there where pianos worked on the album—and, coupled with Rice's Beatles-style head-bopping and twitchy dancing, the band came across as having more amped-up energy than you'd guess from the sweetness of its sound. Then again, during an encore performance of the quiet "Butterfly Nets," the audience stood charmed in near-silence as a female vocalist's lilting voice wafted over it, proving that there's still plenty of sweetness to go around.

Words by Marisa LaScala. Photo by Aubrey Edwards.

After seeing Daniel Johnston perform live on two occasions within the last year, it becomes apparent – disturbingly so – that there are two very different types of Johnston fans: those who show up to witness something special, and those who show up to witness a spectacle. Without fail his fans are granted a glimpse of both.

The opening band, Spanish Prisoners, are not great, to put it mildly. Even so, the concert-goers at Highline Ballroom’s Thursday night packed house remain patient, orderly, taking the edge off with cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. That is until the final verse of Spanish Prisoners’ final song when an ice cube is hurled onstage, thus pelting the singer in the head. Moments later the band wisely exit stage left.

In some ways over the course of the past few years, Dan Bejar and his Destroyer compatriots have become the quiet, unsung kings of what some have described as "hyper literate indie rock." And while this label has no doubt stemmed from Bejar's labyrinthine lyricism, Destroyer has managed to counter any kind of pretension with a somehow unclassifiable brand of freewheeling blues, '70s R&B, bedroom folk, Roxy Music glam, and the occasional lo-fi garage crunch. A sound as comfortably steeped in the past as concerned with looking ahead towards its own unchartered territory.

Performing in support of their latest record, Trouble In Dreams, at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City, Destroyer brought their now-signature sound to a rabid, seemingly over-capacity house. The audience's attention was rapt from the opening electric strums of "Blue Flower/Blue Flame." Wasting no time, the band quickly segued from the sonically slight, albeit gorgeous opener to storming renditions of (the 9+ minute) "Rubies" and Trouble's passive-agressive ode to abandonment "Dark Leaves Form A Thread." Here, three songs in, was where Destroyer proved how deftly they're able to not only balance casual, effortless playing within their own air-tight structures, but how Destroyer is not just simply Dan Bejar. Without Nic Bragg's searing guitar accents, or Ted Bois' spiraling piano lines, Bejar's songs might not carry the weight that they do -- and he knows it.