I headed out to Ybor City last Thursday expecting to be delighted by shake-a-billy songstress Rachel Goodrich, but I managed to miss more than half the set she performed with her stripped-down three-piece … or she just played a really short set and I caught the last four songs (no encore included). I enjoyed the tiny bit I witnessed, but my live music needs were by no means satisfied, so I returned to Ybor the following Friday for a double-shot of shows. [Photos by Phil Bardi.]

Originally, I’d mapped out my night so that I could jump back and forth between New World Brewery and Crowbar, and catch all the music I wanted to see (Poetry n’ Lotion and The Pauses at New World, Casiokids and Starfucker at Crowbar). Of course, sets never run as scheduled, so I ended up arriving at New World right before The Pauses were due to start.

I wrote a story about the Orlando indie alt pop trio a few months back as they were gearing up for the release of their debut full-length, A Cautionary Tale, which dropped earlier this month via New Granada Records. The band’s been out supporting it ever since and this show was only one of a few that followed a stop at this year’s SXSW. While the musicians looked a tad careworn, they served up a tight, stellar-quality set, opening with the driving instrumental ambiance of “Goodbye, Winthorpe,” its melodic basslines winding elegantly around discordant and occasionally distorted guitar notes, both propelled into a heavy push-pull drum-tumbling climax, singer Tierney Tough’s pretty coo closing the song. The band immediately followed it with “Go North,” the album’s up-tempo lead-off track and “Goodbye, Winthorpe”-complementary bass-guitar chord progression making the transition between the two all the more elegant.

The rest of the set mainly drew cuts off the new LP — the pleasant melodic-dissonant interplay of “Beyond Bianca,” the sweet electro-pop cute-tastiness of “The Migration,” the downbeat trip-hop of “Pull the Pin,” a personal favorite that reminds me of Becoming X-era Sneaker Pimps — along with a few numbers I didn’t recognize but enjoyed nevertheless. Overall, an extremely satisfying set, so much so that I was compelled to stay for the entire length of it and thus miss almost the majority of Casiokids at Crowbar, who were in the midst of an energetic set-ending percussion-fueled electro-jam that wrapped up only a few minutes after we arrived.

This article appears in Mar 31 – Apr 6, 2011.