Viernes Play First Gig New York Gig

The sales pitch was standard, but the delivery wasn't quite right. Thursday night at Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Union Hall, where his band was in the midst of making its New York City debut, Viernes guitarist Alberto Hernandez mentioned there were T-shirts available at the merch booth. He spoke into the microphone he'd just used to sing 'Glacial Pace of Change,' one of the Florida duo's characteristically hallucinatory jams.

"It's weird with the reverb," Hernandez said, realizing the extent to which Viernes' favorite vocal effect, abundant throughout Thursday's set, was affecting his words. He sounded like Zeus, or whichever Greek god used his booming voice to help chosen lyre players hawk their logo togas.

Such moments were common Thursday night, as man and machine forged an imperfect alliance. Faced with iffy sound levels and uncooperative instrument cables, Hernandez and multi-instrumentalist partner Sean Moore struggled to match the seamless clarity of their recently released debut, 'Sinister Devices.' What changed was the very character of their material: the album's suave, cottony electro-psych daydreams turned rougher and less soothing.

This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Had the musicians been able to recreate more faithfully their studio sound, they might have sacrificed the spontaneity and in-the-moment feel of Thursday's performance.

On opener 'Entire Empire,' Hernandez's guitar seemed to scrape against Moore's spacey synths and electronic beats. Drummer Tyson Bodiford later joined the melee, and on such tunes as 'Faulty Investments,' his jarring rhythms sliced holes through the fog.

Viernes is Spanish for Friday, and Moore and Hernandez named the group after the day of the week they used to get together and make music after work. By all accounts, it was meant to be a casual project, and even Thursday night, as the musicians prepared to capitalize on mounting blog buzz and stage five shows -- including two linked with the coming weekend's massive Brooklyn-wide Northside Festival -- over the next 48 hours, they played with the nonchalance of two dudes killing time before dinner.

If they were fazed by whatever techy hiccups muddied their sound, they didn't let it sink their high-floating falsetto harmonies.