Those Darlins, at the top of their game, are excellent: playing ironically earnest kitschy cowpunk — like “Wild One”, the unquestionable highlight from 2009’s self-titled debut, and their stellar cover of “Let’s Talk Dirty In Hawaiian” from this year’s Prine tribute album, Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows — and harmonizing in a way that manages to be both sweet and dirty, on a studio recording they sound funny, and fun.

Live it’s an entirely different story. Live, they’re pretty much a force of nature. It’s not that they have more gravitas live, necessarily; it’s that they have a lot more firepower, soundwise, live, and the earnest kitsch gets pinned down by driving guitars and crazy good drumming and turns into songs that punch you in the face. I was both startled and delighted to discover that all three girls are multi-instrumentalists, swapping guitars, basses and a ukelele between them during the course of their set, and the harmonies sound ever dirtier and sweeter live — Kelley Darlin, in particular, whose heart-stopping voice carried perfect opener “Who’s That Knockin’ At My Window?”.

They played just over an hour, tearing, sometimes literally, through a mix of tracks from the self-titled and new tracks from their just-finished follow-up. It was really good to hear the new stuff; I’m a proponent of hearing stuff live in order to get a sense of it. One of Those Darlins’ strengths is the humor of their songwritings, and it sounds like the new album will carry that on. I’m looking forward to it; there’s a sense of tongue-in-cheek-ness to the first album that it would be a shame to lose, but there was also a maturity and subtly to the new stuff that’s occasionally missing from their debut.

It was a high energy, cheerful show. A small crowd and a muddy mix — loud is fine! I can cope with loud, but when vocals are muddy all the way back to the 506’s door, I become grouchy; apparently there are, like, two people I trust to mix in the 506 and Fake Joah Tunnell from Butterflies is not one of them — but the crowd was in good spirits and drank a lot of beer, and I stood in front of a couple of girls who were rocking hard. I love when the hipsters — and Those Darlins draw a hipster crowd, albeit more of a rockabilly hipster one, at least in the CH, because hipsters, we has them — show emotion.

Gentleman Jesse & His Men opened, and absolutely blew me away — I didn’t know that what I was really in the mood for last night was clever danceable three-voiced garage pop, but apparently I was, and they were great. A+, would go see again in a split second. They’re from Atlanta and seemed to have a bunch of hardcore fans in the CH, so I’m hoping they play here regularly. The Strange Boys rounded out the bill, and they were just fine; nothing outstanding, nothing offensive. I’ve just seen a white guy sing soul better this year, is all. (Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed & the True Loves’ Come And Get It is holding steady in the #2 slot in my end-of-the-year best of, sadly for many other white boy soul bands.) It was a surprisingly cohesive bill, actually, because even though none of the bands sounded alike, they all suited each other. Great guitar work, songs to dance to. Everybody had a little pop music buried under their own specific genre, and that was fantastic.

Still farting around with shooting in B&W (instead of post-processing). Still liking it, but I’m also still not sure why I’m drawn this way right now.