When My 22 White Devils took the stage as the first opener for the Your 33 Black Angels CD release party at the Cake Shop, they rocked out to crowd of about twenty. The group is so underground they don’t even have a MySpace page. They played a few poppy songs – part hip hop, part new wave, part folk rock – and sounded good enough to get some applause out of the audience, however unrehearsed and ragged around the edges they appeared. Watching this set was like watching your goofball friends play a frat gathering – or, as the singer for Discovery would relate about twenty minutes later, “it feels like a party… at your mom’s house.”

Discovery, a dance-friendly group from Brooklyn, sounds like Blondie fresh from a trip to Kenya. Lead singer Kathleen Cholewka sings like Debbie Harry and looks like Cindy Crawford, which is never a bad thing. She was backed by some extremely heavy, extremely funky bass, a traditional drum kit, an occasional synth line from the keyboard, a huge bongo, and a crowd, now forty or fifty strong, that would not dance like this again for the rest of the night. In the Background I even heard someone scream like a deranged chimpanzee.

By the time the Bahamas went on, the crowd had again doubled to about eighty. These guys were definitely the surprise of the night, fusing Lou Reed/Steven Malkmus vocals with surf guitar, new wave twang, psychedelia, and a jigger of Sonic Youth dissonance. There were even a few screeching guitar solos that were somehow simultaneously Pixies and Pink Floyd. You can’t really dance to this music, but fortunately you can stare intently, bob your head, and yell “more.” The crowd did not hesitate to exercise these prerogatives.

The aptly named Heavy Creatures followed, and at roughly 100 people, the Cake Shop was basically packed to capacity at this point. Heavy Creatures is a slow-rolling animal from Brooklyn that plays deep, plodding metal psychedelic rock – lots of power chords, lots of bass and drums, lots of minor scales, a couple of 45-minute jam sessions, and a red-headed female singer, who is kind of hot. People seemed to be enjoying their sound, and at least one dude was headbanging pretty enthusiastically. Or maybe we were all just getting drunk. To be fair though, it really wouldn’t be easy to listen to this stuff without throwing up some rock quotes and breaking into at least one air guitar solo.

Your 33 Black Angels went on at midnight, and suddenly the 100 people populating the long, dark hall that is The Cake Shop all crammed up into about two sardine-like concentric circles around the tiny stage. People were pretty riled up, and evidently everyone there knew these guys personally, because at least half of the audience was called up to the stage at various points to sing a couple with the band.....