Usually, my game plan for hopping between First Ave and 7th Street Entry for competing shows is to catch the first half of the main room headliners, then finish it off with at least the last half of the Entry band's set. Last night at the sibling clubs, though, I was able to catch the first 45 minutes of the Ike Reilly Assassination, who played to a near-capacity and semi-incapacitated crowd in the big room. Then I squeezed into the smaller venue for more than half of the Big Pink's set in the super-cramped small room -- and then I was still able to catch about another hour of the IRA afterward!

The Big Pink (shown in the above photo by Vita.mn's Leslie Plesser) certainly isn't the first uber-buzzing band I've seen in the Entry who couldn't muster up more than an hour's worth of material (the Strokes come to mind foremost). Nor are the Brits the first group to essentially just play their one album as-is, with little variation (Strokes again).

Something about the Big Pink's versions of "Velvet," "Crystal Visions," "Count Backwards From Ten" and other album highlights, however, felt a little too canned, by-the-numbers and lifeless. It didn't help that the core band members Robbie Furze and Mark Edwards showed all the personality of empty tuna cans. They brought along extra bandmates and a fleet of strobe lights to liven things up, but the blurring light show just sort of made their J&MC/MBV-style distorted whir seem hypnotic in a sleepy, lulling way. Granted, I didn't see the entire set, but it looked to me like the crowd -- which had waited around in an uncomfortably packed club until almost midnight to see a band wasn't all that into it. Nor was the band.

What a contrast the Entry vibe was to the main room. Reilly's Thanksgiving Eve gigs -- in their eighth year -- are rowdy, raucous, bravado-filled affairs, and this one was no exception, even with a heavy dose of tracks off the brand-new album "Hard Luck Stories," starting with the opener "Lights Out (Anything Goes)." Other new songs included "Sheet Metal Moon," about of friend of Ike's who died at 18, and "Girls in the Backroom," which is actually about war vets, he said.

Ike and the guys were joined throughout the show by the so-called Assault Rifle Singers (three gospel-belting women backup singers) and by his old guitar tech Chris Perricelli of the local band Little Man. It could've all amounted to one big mess but was really quite a cohesive blowout. There were big singalongs again for "Hip-Hop Thighs," "Whatever Happened to the Girl in Me?" and the pre-encore finale "It's Alright to Die," plus, of course, "Commie Drives a Nova" after that. When Ike sang "I Will Let You Down" in the encore, it sound extra ironic after coming out of the Entry.