Twin Sister and Ava Luna at Empty Bottle | Concert preview

The most unlikely funk bill of the week features two bunches of brainy, white Long Islanders. Twin Sister is that rare breed of modern buzz band—one that sounds far better live than on record. The band’s first two EPs quietly motored away like an arts-and-crafts Stereolab. Live, the group retains a touch of that rosy-cheeked krautrock but grooves in a more dream-disco vein, somewhere between the Sugarcubes and Beach House.

Singer Andrea Estrella would be the Björk/Victoria Legrand in that equation. (There is no Einar Örn in this analogy. Whew.) At last summer’s Pitchfork Festival, she looked and sang like a mermaid, with waist-length aquamarine hair and a white shipwreck dress. Her reedy voice hiccuped and flitted over deep bass grooves and feathery washes of wah-wah. The slick and quirky material from the band’s first proper full-length, In Heaven, leaps into even more extroverted dance-club territory, and if it weren’t for the stage banter, you’d swear the members were Swedish.

Coney Island’s Ava Luna is a fascinating collision of blue-eyed soul and postpunk, like Daryl Hall fronting Pere Ubu. Carlos Hernandez’s forced falsetto can go down like a horse pill, but thankfully his jagged edges are softened by the three smooth girls oohing and shoop-shooping throughout. The septet’s upcoming Ice Level slow jams with strings at its sultriest, as on the title track, and builds complex grooves on “Calculus.” If you can dance to it, may I direct you to the yellow tabs of this magazine?