A night of many Firsts

Who could have guessed that the old-timers would best capture the youthful spirit of First Avenue's Best New Bands showcase, which is exactly what the Twilight Hours did Friday night?

And to add insult to injury to all the young punks, they even did it with a tired old classic-rock cover.

Unlike most of the other seven acts at the annual newbies roundup, Friday's gig was not a virginal trip to Minneapolis's most fabled rock stage for the Hours, a new group of local veterans led by former Trip Shakespeare cohorts Matt Wilson and John Munson. They made light of being from a previous generation by cranking up Foreigner's libidinous "Feels Like the First Time" with the kind of vigor they showed 20 years ago -- and the enthusiasm that a lot of the other Best New Band participants showed simply for being picked for the lineup.

With a respectable 1,000 or so fans turning out for relatively unknown bands, Friday's five-hour affair featured an unimaginable musical mish-mash with little to no musical crossover from act to act.

It atypically kicked off with the grungiest, punkiest band of the night, the Leisure Birds, a vintage, organ-punching garage-rock quartet decked out in flannel and beards. From there came the darkest and most harrowing band, rap/rock hybrid trio No Bird Sing, who boldly shrunk the distance between hip-hop and blues.

Experimental indie-folk duo Peter Wolf Crier's set arguably stole the show, impressing the crowd with a full-scale sonic canopy larger than its two-man operation suggests -- a feat enabled by all the loop gadgets and effects pedals at frontman Peter Pisano's feet.

Red Pens also loomed large for a two-person unit. The show's most buzzing band going in, the boy/girl fuzz-rock duo lived up to the hype with roaring versions of "Hung Out" and the Sonic Youth-ish gem "Street Issue." Frontman Howard Hamilton was also the only musician smart enough to mention the merchandise table (see: Band Biz 101).

Slapping Purses creator Jason Powers set up his toolbox full of techno beats and screechy noises in the middle of dancefloor, Dan Deacon-style, which added a fun twist to a set that was ultimately a little too one-note.

Moonstone should have erected a pulpit for its frontman "Rev." Micah Mackert, who broke up the band's prog-rocky instrumental jams by breaking into bona-fide sermons with lines such as "the ulcer of shame" and "at the precipice of pubescence."

Speaking of pubescence, another surprise hit in Friday's lineup was the one-song live debut of TheAfternoonDLight, three St. Cloud high-school boys who delivered their YouTube-buoyed remake of the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys hit, newly dubbed "Minnesota State of Mind."

"This is their first time, if you know what I mean," is how co-host David Campbell winkingly introduced the teens. And that was before the Twilight Hours covered Foreigner -- a coincidence even more cosmic than Moonstone's set.