Speaking of something that really, really works, Khaela Marcich's the Blow opens for AIH, wickedly subverting strident girl pop beats with intelligent, empowered lyrics about gender relations. Not conventionally pretty, but anyways irresistible, Marcich is in constant motion, punching the air and shimmying her torso, dancing the way a 15-year-old dances in her bedroom when no one's around. Of course, she's brave enough to do it in front of a room full of kids. Her first two songs are performed a capella: nothing but mic'd finger snaps to ornament sparse verses. Soon she brings in the enormous hip-hop beats from her upcoming album, Paper Television, in support of wryly observed short-shorts on love and lust.

It's disorienting but somehow exhilarating to hear the kind of echoing drums and pop textures often in service of pop-tart mega-hits wrapped around lyrics about thwarted woman-to-woman love, or to break for the vulnerable admission that "I'd consider myself lucky to be let in your threesome." And there's an erotic pulse to Marcich's heavy-breathing "Pile of Gold", the lead-off cut from her new album, as she traces the correlations between desire and self-actualization across every sort of sexual pairing. She's articulating a viewpoint, not pushing an ideology, and when she dedicates the song to "all the Smith College girls," she immediately amends it by saying, "and the boys, too." Boy or girl, straight or queer, by the end, everybody's dancing.

Playing to an audience that is expecting the highlights from In Case We Die, AIH follows the Blow, winning the crowd over immediately with a new, cowbell-slamming, James-Brown-twitching good time called "Red Turned White." The band's sound is so radically different that at first I don't even recognize "It'5", but the room does, and a young crowd starts bobbing and grooving. It's one of five songs from In Case We Die that they play, and when Kellie Sutherland (now the only female member of the band) gets up to announce that they will be mostly rolling out new material, a drunk in the crowd tells her to shut up and play. Not exactly a proud moment for Western Mass.

The new songs are, in general, far more percussive and jammy, with fewer of the loud-soft swings that made In Case We Die so surprising. Bird spends much of the evening whacking at a drumpad tuned to a cowbell pitch, and other members of the band trade off among woodblocks, drum-kit bongos, and tambourine. There are no more live trombone solos in the AIH repertoire, and where brass is required, the band now looks to MIDI keyboards and synthesizers.

This becomes a problem later, as technical problems shut down one keyboard. Bird makes small talk as his band frantically tries to revive the instrument, and then finally asks if anyone in the audiences knows any jokes. A theater major from Smith gets up and performs three "chemistry" jokes. (One nucleus says to another, "I'm losing my electronics." "Are you sure?" "I'm positive.") There is also a joke about a bear in a bar, and another concerning Darth Vader. The whole vibe becomes tremendously goofy and collaborative -- by asking the audience to solve his problem, Bird has won them over. When the band begins playing again, there is a palpable increase in energy, partly due to the song -- another new one -- and partly related to the whole joke-telling interval.

AIH soldiers on through continued technical difficulties, eventually losing all sound in all monitors. The set, though, continues. "Debbie", another new song played near the end, looks to be a particularly good one, with a Curtis Mayfield falsetto and abrupt guitar slashes. The band closes with "Nevereverever Did," the baroque opening cut from In Case We Die, and it sounds tighter, simpler, and more rock than ever.