The rise of this kind of all-day indie sockhop is proof L.A.’s warehouses aren’t just for freight, psytrance and the odd orgy anymore. The Nomad Gallery Art Compound, a friendly art-bunker wedged deep in untrendy Frogtown, embraced the underground party set’s chill equation of art + music + abandoned industrial space = fuck the Sunset Strip with July 4th’s raucous “New Weird America” Festival. We missed Radio Moscow, but Night Horse’s clattering heavy psych-blues was fine consolation inside a canvas-festooned sheet-metal room, with drummer Brandon Pierce’s mighty sticks bulging the walls. Painter Max Neutra dashed off one monstrous canvas after another in one corner and revered old scene lions stalked among the sweating dudes and tattooed lovelies in print dresses. Night Horse’s variation on the endlessly-customizable Yardbirds prototype was matched by the bliss-bomb detonated by Imaad Wasif & Two Part Beast. It was early evening and the room was a color-slathered steam-bath, but most of the crowd pressed inside to sway and bop to an aggressive dose of crunchy, slow-fused howl. Onetime guitarist for Alaska! and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Wasif is a more nuanced and capable instrumentalist than such welterweight gigs indicate, his intricate playing going over big with an audience clearly into the brainy and heavy. Farflung is finally getting its due these days and did not disappoint, unlimbering a proggy fantasia of whirling metal and space-operatics as the sun went down. We departed for Independence Day’s night convinced the Old Weird need never fret for America’s heritage.

—Ron Garmon