Skipping town to go to the islands for the weekend means having to cram a whole weekend's worth of nightlife into a single Thursday night. It's not impossible—Thursdays are often the best night of the week for going out anyway—and this particular Thursday, June 14, had a lot going for it: the opening of the new Cha Cha Lounge on East Pike Street, Gang Gang Dance and Ariel Pink at the Crocodile, and Gaybash at the Crescent.

Spotted at Cha Cha's opening: rock star/bartender Kim Warnick (parked on a stool at the bar before the place made its first dollar), Band of Horses' Rob Hampton and Creighton Barrett (the band is in town finishing up some new recordings), Quentin Ertel of Havana, Clayton Vomero (aka Pretty Titty) of Sing Sing, and Curtis Hall of Grand Archives. Bartender Kristen Finstad was playing the same mix of Cha Cha employee-rock that closed out the old place last week, making for an easy transition to the new place.

But not everything about the opening day was smooth. Workers were moving in one last booth after the bar opened, temporarily blocking the door before they discovered they had only half of the booth and removed it. The foosball table ate the first dollar that was fed into it, but seemed to be working later. A couple patrons wandered out with their drinks into the closed-off alley behind the bar, and it wasn't clear whether they were supposed to be drinking there. Das Llamas frontman/burrito artist Kerry Zettel lost an apron out of the upstairs window and had to ask the congregated smokers to toss it back up to him. Warnick said she was losing sleep over the new computerized cash registers, having learned them on Monday and already forgotten everything.

Gang Gang Dance were disappointing live. I was expecting them to be a little more like the hazy, Middle Eastern—inflected dub experiments of DJ/Rupture and a little less like the delayed-vox Italo of Glass Candy. Still, it's always fun to watch the split-second disconnect between a singer's mouth movements and her processed vocals, and Gang Gang Dance's singer dresses like a Satanist hippie, which is cool. Gaybash at the Crescent was a chaotic, glittery mess, as usual, featuring a brief live performance from Ursula Android and the Ononos as well as a birthday celebration for Jackie Hell.

On the ferry to Lopez Island Friday, June 15, a girl gave us a cutesy, hand-drawn flyer for a pair of shows at Lopez Village over the weekend: "Evening Plains, RB Reed, Sweet Potatoes, 6 pm, two nights only!" It was a sweet gesture, but I still missed both shows, sitting on beaches losing track of time—although I saw the bands setting up with their banjo, acoustic guitar, and washboard on Saturday at the Island's farmer's market, not too far from a couple of jugglers—and I felt bad enough about it to check the bands out once back on land: Evening Plains are dour, downcast female-fronted folk in the vein of early Cat Power or Seattle's own Tiny Vipers; RB Reed plays weepy, dark country ballads highlighted by slide guitar and his own deep, resonant singing; Sweet Potatoes is breathy, no-fi, one-woman bedroom recordings apparently influenced by the K Records of Mirah and the Microphones. Evening Plains play Sunday, June 24, at the Third Place Pub in Ravenna.

Kaz Nomura, aka

PWRFL Power, won the Capitol Hill Block Party "Block Star" competition on Friday night at the Vera Project, earning himself a slot on the Capitol Hill Block Party's main stage July 28 at 2:00 p.m. (not to mention a PA system, a cell phone, and his song placed in a nationally televised Esurance commercial). Nomura's virtuosic acoustic guitar and cute, freaky pop songs will make for a weird, welcome addition to this year's already impressive lineup, which features among others Girl Talk, Blue Scholars, Spoon, and Against Me!

Also on the Block Party bill are Seattle's Fleet Foxes, who have a stellar new batch of songs posted on their MySpace page. Singer Robin Pecknold says they're "getting the label thing figured out," and their still unfinished debut LP "looks like it will be coming out sooner than later," although their upcoming shows list has December 25, 2010 marked as "Record is not done" at "Takeyourtimesville, Washington."

Finally, long-running, radical DIY punk music and politics 'zine Punk Planet has announced it is folding as of this coming issue. The magazine will continue to exist as a web presence and will continue to publish books, but distributor bankruptcy has forced the elimination of the magazine itself. The Punk Planet website bemoans the rise of internet publications, the decline of record business, and the loss of independent bookstores, but also acknowledges, "Great things end, and the best things end far too quickly."