Surfer Blood played Wednesday night at DC9 with Turbo Fruits and Grooms. Photo courtesy Surfer Blood.

It would be hard to find accurate statistics on the number of guitar bands currently gigging in any one region, let alone across the country. Not the kind of stuff you find on the census. I’m not even sure I could hazard a guess, though, like most of the crowd at DC9 Wednesday night, I imagine myself as a pretty big aficionado of guitar pop and its many branches. Let’s say the District of Columbia has 20 all by itself — can you imagine how many there are nationwide? The number’s gotta be huge, so what sets apart the bad from the good and the good from the great? What packs the club in the middle of the work week for Surfer Blood, a bunch of barely-twenty-somethings from West Palm Beach with only a single recorded LP to call their own?

I don’t have a good answer, and last night didn’t help. When you get right down to it, the three bands on the bill inhabit a similar musical space, but in context, they have different approaches to what they do. First up was Grooms, who mixed Pavement-esque vocals with plenty of noise and the occasional catchy riff. Neither bassist nor guitarist sang particularly well, but they had energy and matched boilerplate indie guitar rock to ambitious prog-esque song structures.