BrightestYoungThings: LIVE DC: Throw Me The Statue / The Brunettes / Nurses @ Rock & Roll Hotel

All words: Andy Hess
All photos: Francis Chung

Indie-pop reigned supreme Friday night at the Rock N Roll Hotel as Throw Me The Statue, The Brunettes and Nurses all took the stage to play their own particular spin on the genre. But don't let that overused genre descriptor fool you, it was worth the $12 tickets and the $4 PBR.

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Portland trio Nurses led off the night with other-worldly psych-folk jams (think: Animal Collective, Yeasayer, the Ruby Suns). A good portion of their 45-minute set was from their recent release Apple's Acre. While music recorded for a bedroom doesn't make for a particularly good live performance (see: Wavves), Nurses' hushed melodies and lush electronics make for an interesting live show that definitely kept my attention.

Next up were The Brunettes and a 30-minute delay due to audio problems. But that didn't keep the quintet from New Zealand from playing -- give or take -- eight songs with a majority from their self-released Red Rollerskates EP. The Brunettes make perfect pop music -- sweet without crossing the line of being obnoxiously cute. That might be because of the he said/she said dynamics between co-lead singers Heather Mansfield and Jonathan Bree that make these love songs play out both sides of the story.

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Throw Me The Statue (TMTS from here on out) constantly come up on my wife's Pandora channels all the time and I never understood why until I saw them live. TMTS take their glitchy, washed mass of indie-pop and come out on stage and blow you out of the water. It's hard to make a recording sound better live, but TMTS managed to not only reproduce their recordings in a live setting, but knock these renditions out of the park. It was yet another stellar performance from a line-up of bands that were nothing but great on that particular night.