By DCist Contributor Valerie Paschall

By the time Northern State came into existence in 2000, the term “girl power” had become a sort of joke, referring to acts that spent as much time undercutting this “power” of theirs with shameless self-promotion and dubious costume choices as they did with cultivating any actual vocal or lyrical talent. As such, using this term (or any ambiguous feminist term) to describe these three ladies from Brooklyn seems unfair since instead of wasting any time with gender identification, they slowly but surely turned a Rock n Roll Hotel room of folded arms into an all-out dance party. That in itself sounds oddly… powerful.

Northern State’s Julie “Hesta Prynn” Potash, Correne “Spero Whiz Kid” Spero and Robyn “Sprout” Goodmark spent much of last night’s set premiering songs from this upcoming Tuesday’s release, Can I Keep This Pen? The ladies were clearly proud of this, their third album (and first since their break with Columbia), announcing periodically just what tracks The Beastie Boys’ Ad-rock had produced and proudly declaring after the show that no samples had been used on Can I Keep This Pen? They also had advance copies for sale at the merch table, much to the chagrin of Ipecac, but to the delight of their fans, many of whom appeared to be new converts.