They were in big-rock mode back in September, at the Middle East CD-release party for their The Salty Tang (Archenemy). At that show they became the first band I've ever seen to bring a theremin player and a go-go dancer on stage at the same time, along with a second drummer and two cellists. The sound was the kind of visceral pop that Callahan and guitarist Tom Devaney were aiming for in their previous bands -- she with Turkish Delight, he with Bulkhead -- but never nailed quite this hard.

If that was the light version of Betwixt, their set last Saturday at T.T. the Bear's Place (sharing a bill with kindred spirits Lockgroove) was the dark side. The opening stretch found a seated Devaney and cellist Gordon Withers building King Crimsonesque soundscapes while oceanic slides were flashed onto a screen behind the stage and Callahan did some wordless chants. The set got rockier as it went along, but it maintained some of that undertow -- one of Devaney's current favorite guitar sounds is the floating slide-guitar tone associated with Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. "Back of a Hand," which runs seven minutes on the album, was stretched out even longer on stage, with Callahan's vocals drawing you into the swirl. This was the first time I've seen the band skip over "Seahorse," the local hit from their first album (Moustache), but the new album's sex-and-irony rocker "Jailbreak '98-'99" got in the cheap thrills.

The set also featured one of the cooler cover tunes to show up in some time: "Sundown, Sundown," which Lee Hazlewood wrote and sang with Nancy Sinatra in the mid '60s and Betwixt recorded for Moustache. It's the kind of lonesome-cowboy tearjerker that Stephin Merritt was making fun of when he wrote "Papa Was a Rodeo" (on the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs), but nobody else is writing songs like this anymore. Oddly, Betwixt didn't identify the song before playing it. You've got to admire a band who can do a cover tune so full of snob appeal and not even take credit for digging it up.