FRIDAY

Shoot, it's Deerhunter.

A few days after their headlining appearance at the Bowery Ballroom, Deerhunter put on a semi-secret show (judging by the half-filled room) at Cake Shop on Friday afternoon. Although much of the hype surrounding this group’s live shows has had to do with dress-wearing and bewildering showmanship on the part of frontperson Bradford Cox, what turned out to be most impressive about his performance was the holy calm of his focus, which certainly seemed to make it easier to appreciate Deerhunter as an actual band.

And what a band they were, transcendent in a way that rendered even the unexciting bits of the ensemble’s visual manifestation mesmerizing, like the blinking lights on guitar pedals and the star shape of Cox’s gently shaking tambourine. Their songs’ studio sounds were filtered through a more grinding rock dynamic, and songs like “Wash Off” from Fluorescent Grey took on a Neu!-like rhythm while showcasing the combo’s finesse for issuing forth a dreamy, noise-inflected ambience. Cox perched momentarily like a precious bird on the bass drum before the band finished with a cover of Swell Maps’ “Cake Shop” - Nikki Sudden would likely have been very pleased to hear these five dudes pay homage.

Moshi moshi, Japanther.

Japanther, a two-man weirdo punk institution outta New York, brought steamrolled noise-pop with pseudo-rap interludes to the Knitting Factory, singing into telephone microphones when they weren’t hyping “passion and sexuality” and sneaking peeks at drummer Ian Vanek’s chest muscles. They drew what was easily one of the week’s most amped crowds, giving a more wistful, melodic spin and a lot of toy keyboards to Rollins-era Black Flag punk, finishing their set before one had any time to process what was happening.

Gimme that Old Time Relijun.

Old Time Relijun drove at least one man to a doomed stage-dive attempt. He hit the floor, but got up quickly. Still, it’s understandable why he made the attempt: the spastic frenzy of their stand-up-and-dance punk feels like an exhortation to repent, but thankfully faceplanting isn’t a necessary result of heeding their oblique plea. Vocalist and guitarist Arrington de Dionyso is like a secularized Jonathan Edwards fronting a rock band in bicycle shorts, ready to spawn a third great awakening of dance move-busting. Whatever demons that may have fit inside the body of their massive stand-up bass were surely purged, and the simultaneous blares of two saxophones in one dude’s mouth one-upped James Chance’s no-wave nutso groove.

SATURDAY

Islands light.

Islands, who appeared at the AAM Showcase in Williamsburg on Saturday afternoon, put on a show that was truly impressive in light of the rather tentative, uncertain atmosphere that characterized last year’s show at Slim’s following the release of Return to the Sea.

There were a lot of new songs this time around, which bore a stylistic resemblance to the first album in terms of their usage of saxophone and strings, but were otherwise sounded a lot more thoughtful and composed. The black-clad band sounded a whole lot tighter than I remember them being, today playing string-embellished pop with a minor symphonic sweep and a confidence that’s surprising considering the frail warble of vocalist-guitarist Nick Thorburn.

At no point did the specter of the Unicorns (or Paul Simon’s Graceland, for that matter) haunt what it was that they were doing: Islands is very much its own thing now, and the only obvious point of reference was a passage joyously resembling Buster Poindexter’s “Hot Hot Hot.” Even the Return to the Sea songs that once felt way too long were convincingly delivered, with “Swans (Life After Death)” including some heavy guitar jams towards the six- or seven-minute mark, and “Where There’s A Will, There’s a Whalebone” showcasing Subtitle rhyming over the bridge.

It's golden with Santogold.

Santogold, a.k.a., Santi White, sang over heavy, super-dark electro beats for an exuberant, fascinating result at Fader’s show space on Ludlow. The Brooklyn artist's vocals often assumed an old-school dancehall inflection, but the psychedelic glitch wallpaper that accompanied her ultimately made for terrific, fractured pop: the sea of smiles and sing-alongs in the room was pretty exciting to witness. In a lot of ways, her stuff sounded like M.I.A., but more readily fun and steeped in American hip-hop history. I get the feeling that she’s gonna be the source of a hit tune stateside pretty soon.