For the past two days, Washington DC’s 9:30 club has played host to two of indie rock’s most well regarded bands—The New Pornographers and Belle and Sebastian. While you’d never mistake one band for the other, the common traits of both acts on this nominally co-headliner tour are their highly inventive songwriting and dextrous musical arrangements. Over the past two days, fans of both bands came out in force, but it was clear after two days that the Belle and Sebastian partisans caught the better end of the deal. Hampered by an illness to a critical band member, the New Pornographers struggled to match the high-flying pyrotechnics of their most recent studio album, Twin Cinema. DCist came out to cover the show on its second night. This brief review of the New Pornographers’ truncated and star-crossed performance will be followed tomorrow with a review of Belle and Sebastian’s appearance.

The evening began with an abbreviated set from Vancouver’s New Pornographers, who performed under conditions that they no doubt hope they’ll never have to repeat. Two of the band’s most important members—rangy eccentric Dan Bejar and charismatic clean-up hitting chanteuse Neko Case—did not join the band on this touring jaunt, leaving nominal band quarterback Carl Newman to carry the torch alone. Frankly, these absences are enough to understandably elicit some degree of audience skepticism. But it’s simply unfortunate that they took the stage the past two nights without the vocal talents of Case’s more than capable understudy, Kathryn Calder. As Newman related, Calder has been struck with a “case of the gitis” that has rendered her barely able to speak.