Let’s preface this review with an observation: It is nearly impossible for a band to sound their best in Vera’s auxiliary performance space. The hard surfaces and inadequate system render loud rock music nuanceless, murky.

That being said, local openers Pillow Fight Fight need some work before they sound good in any venue. The young guitar/drums duo make an artless, angsty rock that storms through one ear and out the other without leaving much of an impression other than an inchoate roar and a thrashing of the players’ limbs—oh, and the drummer's rad, mic'd-up helmet.

Baltimore trio Thank You followed. Guitarist/keyboardist Michael warmed up with a couple of bars from the Banana Splits theme song on his MeloSonic keyboard, flinging this reviewer back to his ’60s childhood. Talk about a shocker…

However, this bit of absurdly cheerful kids-TV music was a red herring for the performance that ensued. Thank You immediately burst into a This Heat-like display of tension- and friction-inducing guitar dualing and powerhouse tubthumping. They proceeded to grind out exhilarating instrumentals with implicit—and some actual—howls. The guitarists often switched to their knockoff-Farfisa organs to lay down some strident, Alice Coltrane-esque drones and ululations. Like This Heat, Thank You use repetition as a conduit to transcendence, though those of weak attention span may (mis)interpret it as tedium.

Thank You's set became progressively more intense, as if they were trying to rein in the universe’s chaos and mold it into noisy sculptures. They finished with a cyclonic, shattering climax. Pity the band who has to follow that…

But San Francisco’s Mi Ami held their own with yet more foundation-threatening, raucous ruckus. Their sound was much fuller, wilder, and noisier than what the Watersports mini-album would lead you to believe. In fact, Mi Ami’s tumult caused a painting on the Vera’s wall to slip off of its hook. Bassist Jacob Long’s robust low end constrasted with vocalist Daniel Martin-McCormick’s yapping (every other word sounded like “echo,” for some reason), which was weirdly pre-pubescent (in a recent discussion about Mi Ami, an employee at Everyday Music revealed that he thought dude was a girl).

Mi Ami sounded best when they eased off on the feral rock action and slowed to a warped dub number that morphed into Material-like mutant disco. The shirtless drummer Damon Palermo cut a Ginger Baker-esque figure, and he shined hard on the set-closing chuggernaut, a ferocious kind of kraut-funkadelia that recalled Tussle on ’roids. Poor sound environment notwithstanding, this was a devastating exclamation point to a thrilling evening of American underground music.

Thank You photo via their MySpace.