Short and sweet is how Dan Whitford and his merry band of Aussies played it on Tuesday night at the first of Cut Copy’s two sold out shows at the 9:30 Club. Clocking in at under an hour, the Melbourne, Australia-based group’s set (and a two-song encore) left a drenched audience wanting more.

DCist caught up with bassist Ben Browning of Australian synthpop group Cut Copy just after their third studio album, Zonoscope, was released last month. (What exactly is a zonoscope, you may ask? Browning explains this fantastical contraption below.) Resting up before launching into an exhaustive North American tour that includes swinging through Coachella in April, Browning also took some time to reminisce about his favorite show Cut Copy has played in D.C., and offer up some advice to American bands headed to his hometown of Melbourne.

The greatest trick the best bands ever pull is convincing every audience that they’re their favorites. It’s no easy feat. The road is monotonous, every club starts to look the same, one sea of bobbing heads becomes indistinguishable from the next. Generally, when you say you’re just thrilled to be here in Washington, D.C. tonight, we usually know that you’re following a routine, a script, and hoping that you filled in the blank with the…

It was an Australian electronic spectacular on Friday at the 9:30 Club, with Melbourne’s Cut Copy and Sydney’s The Presets taking the stage, along with Heartbreak from London. The crowd was sold out and in a dancing mood, and the bands served them well. The Presets, a duo, had probably the best sound set-up we’ve ever experienced, with crisp vocals, loud instruments and samples, and booming bass that could make your hair shake even when…

On the list of the most widely circulated myths about Washington, sandwiched in between “they all work for the government” and “it’s such a transient city” is this little mistruth: “no one in D.C. knows how to have a good time”. Now, we could (and probably will) spend all week arguing this point in the comments, but at the end of the day, that surely isn’t going to convince anyone outside of D.C. that we…