Over in what they refer to as the “Atlas District” – known more commonly by the rest of Western civilization as H Street NE – the Rock and Roll Hotel is slowly coming into its own as a venue. They have a diverse array of solid lineups checking in over the next month or so, and last night they hosted one of their better ones, an evening of music from local act Junior League and national acts Say Hi To Your Mom, +/-, and Bishop Allen. The latter three bands are ones I’ll call “For Your Consideration” acts — three bands who’ve won and deserved their modest success that I feel pretty confident can easily win some new fans. At ticket prices that ranged between $10 and $12, the R&R Hotel is making it possible to assay some new acts at an affordable price. (If you missed last night’s show, next Tuesday’s bill of The Long Winters with The Broken West and Stars of Track and Field offers rock fans the same level of low-cost to high-potential goodness.)

Kicking things off last night was DC’s Junior League, a six piece outfit who create an easy-going, roots-country sound. The band deploys all the right gear for what they want to accomplish, — harmonica and mandolin plying the melodies, a singer with an appropriately achy and lonesome voice, and, around her neck, that rarely seen but always appreciated item known as The Devil’s Instrument.* Would that it had gotten a fuller workout last night!

If Junior League came off as little more than decent-yet-not-remarkable, it had mostly to do with the halting, hesitant way they played — the band seemed hemmed in, the vocalist tentative, and the drums were miked altogether too loud. Junior League seemed to at last hit some sort of groove going into their penultimate number, a frisky little funk diversion called “Charmed,” and pulling it off seemed to bolster the group’s confidence. They rallied, and went out on a high note. Overall, they were whelming, but they have a decent-sized passel of fans and could very well turn out an altogether more solid outing when they play the Velvet Lounge during the Six Points Music Festival.

When you call your band Say Hi To Your Mom, its only natural to expect a certain degree of…well…adorableness. And this is precisely what the band aspires to: crafting fuzzed out, buzzy pop that’s played loudly and densely, narrating comically mopey stories from the wilderness of dating and mating. In Say Hi To Your Mom’s world, too-coy lovers are threatened with Star Trek weaponry and the outsized poutiness of undead creatures, while relationships founder over office supplies and videogame competitiveness. For both their sonic mien and their surefooted use of irony, the band owes a bit of a debt to acts like Weezer (and, even moreso, to the tragically unlamented Weezer-spawn Chopper One).

While bass seems to stick to walls of the Hotel like a coat of paint, everyone involved managed to get Say Hi To Your Mom’s sound as close to right as possible, and the band performed with buoyancy and confidence. Eric Elbogen, the braintrust behind the band, is a charmingly smirky frontman who ably communicates his love of noisy ebullience to the audience. But the band’s secret weapon is definitely keyboardist Nouela Johnston, who capably handles the Korg-driven basslines with her left hand, teases out pleasing melodic flourishes on her Rhodes with the right, and adds Splenda-sweet harmonies that never fail to give each tune the right amount of lift. Say Hi hit many of the highlights in their repertoire, including the mockingly threatening "Your Brains vs. My Tractorbeam," the cotton-candy put down "Sad, But Endearingly So" and two of their very best songs about vampires. And they really do have many.

As the second changeover occurred, the black-clad and pomaded Say Hi fans receded to the bar, giving way to a crowd that was, satorially speaking, much more "C++ programmer" in nature. Appropriately so, because +/- bring an impressive level of technical trickery to the table — proggy time-signatures, live looping. Happily, the band plays with such stunning adeptness that it never feels like they’ve gotten bogged down in a bag of gimmickry. On their latest record, Let’s Build A Fire, the band comes off as gorgeously atmospheric rockers, but they are an altogether different beast live — hitting the audience with white sheets of deafening sound and coppery melodies. At full roar, the band achieves something impressively molten.

All spastic, barely contained rhythms and pyromanic guitars, +/- absolutely blew the doors off the place, and like Say Hi, did so in a way that communicated the same infectious enjoyment to the audience. Frontman James Baluyut, whose vocals are wonderfully precise and insistent, was feeling every inch of it last night – spasmodic and leapy – and their guitarist ripped his way through two instruments and started working on destroying a third. They momentarily let up on their aural assault to wend their way through the AM gold of “Yo Yo Yo (don’t fall in love),” but when they came right back with “One Day You’ll Be There” and its scissoring twin guitars starting and stopping on dimes, you could sense the audience becoming addicted.

(Incidentally, while it elicited some groans last night, the band made a late entrée in the DC catchphrase contest: “Coming to DC is always a Capitol idea.” Yeah, it’s cheesy, but tell me you couldn’t see it on a brochure or something. If DC goes with that, we’ll insist they credit and reward +/- for the effort.)

Bishop Allen garnered attention last year when, as a way of revitalizing their creative juices, they committed themselves to putting out a four-song EP every month for the whole of 2006. Those recordings really did the trick, and are a example of truly great songwriting — the band came up with more than just deft wordplay, they succeeded in creating a fully-defined world view. The characters of Bishop Allen songs find resonances in their own stories to capital-H History, and mitigate their angst by seeking solace in the act of travel — following both roads and whims, seeking out something lovely. Those EPs are thus full of delicate beauty and a fetching optimism, but one had to wonder how the band was going to compete with +/-‘s sonic assault armed with songs one knew from a series low-key recordings.

As it turned out, Bishop Allen came fully prepared to give their tunes a more full-fleshed rock sound, and to do so without sacrificing the quirky instrumentation of the originals which feature keys, glockenspiel, and the even more rarely seen but even more appreciated rock ukelele. Rather than attempt to compete with the previous acts in terms of volume, they wisely opted to instead kick up a raucuously chaotic performance. And while their opening number “The Monitor” felt a little unwieldy in its new arrangement, Bishop Allen very quickly found their groove. By the time they got to “The Same Fire,” they were making a merry din, and watching the group whoop it up and interact with each other, you couldn’t help but feel like you were at some sort of revival.

As their set went on, the band managed to not just maintain the momentum of the show, but also to achieve the kind of intimacy for which their songs are built. The high point of the evening came during the songs “Corazon” and “Flight 180.” Appropriately so: “Corazon” is the true-life tale of the band rescuing an abandoned piano, an important biographical point in the Bishop Allen story and “Flight 180,” to my recollection, is perhaps the first song to steal back the metaphor of being in a plane over Manhattan and ascribe to it a lovely meaning in place of the more sinister overtones the image has lately engendered.

Both songs are slow builders that hit joyful emotional peaks and allow the band to unleash their unbridled optimism — and they had their effect, at least upon the most intimately involved folks in the audience, who weaved in time with the music and applauded for more when the show was over. Bishop Allen offered the night’s only encore, and they fittingly crushed it with a full-tilt performance of “Things Are What You Make Of Them” — the manifesto of the most uncynical band in the world, who only want to show you beautiful things.

*Admittedly, many folks ascribe the title “The Devil’s Instrument” to the fiddle, and, if you want, we can totally fight about it.

Live photos by Flickr user xxo23o. Bishop Allen EP image by Flickr user logan.johnson.