Upstairs at Piano’s, Friday night: the Hardly Art / Suicide Squeeze / Sub Pop showcase. The downstairs component is well-reviewed by Marc Hogan for Pitchfork, and includes a photo of Steve from Blood City joining Oxford Collapse onstage. (That’s two-thirds of a Coup Fourre reunion, fellas…)

During said Oxford Collapse set, Adam commented that the upstairs show had the feeling of a DIY punk show. That would have been true even before Atlanta’s The Coathangers threw balloons, and later confetti, into the crowd, adding to a general sense of enthusiastic chaos.

I’ve written before about Pretty & Nice in this space, and both their upstairs show and a show the next night at The Charleston in Brooklyn found them in good form: both the jarringly noisy and reassuringly catchy sides of the band were in full display. Topping it off was some good, surreal stage banter, including an offhand reference to rain dance music, and an offhand number called “Life on Mars?” that was, emphatically, not the David Bowie song of the same name.

The Coathangers took a little longer to click for me. Their roots are pretty clearly in punk, and their basslines are bold, but for a group that’s capable of some nice onstage rage and vitriol (some of the vocals took me back to my misspent hardcore youth), there’s a kind of sidearm quality to their music. They aren’t necessarily out to steamroll you or prompt frenzied dancing — there’s both a cerebral element to their music and something more visceral present. Which, paradoxically, removes a little of the immediacy that one might get from a band playing with such intensity. By the end of their set, I found myself impressed, but still somewhat detached — much like my reaction to Women earlier in the week, I’m just as curious to hear where they take this sound as I am to take in their set the next time they’re in New York.