The Wake

First Avenue’s side-room, the 7th Street Entry, is small and dark; David to the Main Room’s Goliath. Lit by an exit sign, four candles and a few colored spotlights, 7th Street is intimate and seductive. However, it can pack a mean punch. It’s an ideal venue for the highly acclaimed but sparsely known indie-pop group Headlights, who performed on April 4 with Page France and The Winter Blanket.

Headlights is Tristan Wraight, Erin Fein and Brett Sanderson, three Midwesterners who wouldn’t look out of place on a European stage, the sort you find in back-alley clubs not mentioned in Fodor’s. The guitar, synth and drum trio is said to have “an uncanny knack for soaring peaks and energetic compositions,” and the bands they’re compared to is a “who’s who” list of indie-pop stardom.

Their 2006 release, “Kill Them With Kindness,” does just that: unleashing a whirlwind of catchy tracks that sweeps you up and drags you away like Dorothy careening toward Oz. Wraight and Fein’s vocal harmonies are partly to blame. Though reminiscent of Polyvinyl Records label-buddies Mates of State, Headlights whisper where their counterparts wail, and still make lyrics like “Broken teeth/Broken eyes/We’ll all die someday” sound like celebratory statements of life rather than morose ruminations on death. The same can be said for “Tokyo,” a tribute to life on the road from their four-song “The Enemies” EP, which concedes, “Another broken heart/Another town you must take in stride/If home is where the heart is/Then home is here.”

“Here” could be a tavern in Kansas City, a café in Hannover, or a restaurant named Cowboy Monkey in Headlights’ hometown of Champaign, Illinois, where the threesome share a 19th-century house among soybean and corn fields. Not that they’re home much. “We have a goal to tour as much as our bodies can handle,” Wraight told the music website MundaneSounds.com last November, in the midst of a 55-show tour—a light load after their 72-show tour the previous spring.

This spring Headlights was joined by Maryland’s folk-pop act Page France for parts of their latest three-month round-the-world trek. Like Headlights, who once performed as Absinthe Blind and Orphans, Page France rose from the ashes of another band, named for lead guitarist and vocalist Michael Nau, in 2004.

“They’re really fucking good,” spits a rambunctious fan during the “Weatherman Section 1,” when the poetic Nau sings “Here I am/The weatherman/Here today/And gone tomorrow/Tell me what you want to hear/No skies of grey/No clouds of sorrow.”

Next up, closing the seven-song set, is the bell-shaking marriage hymn “Chariots,” promising “We will become a happy ending.”

Local The Winter Blanket warmed up the unseasonably cold night as the openers for Headlights and Page France. With the lyrics “You’re looking quite pale these days/You’re looking quite thin,” The Winter Blanket could be describing any indie rock back migrating south from Canada or galloping out of Omaha’s Saddle Creek Records. But this evolving group’s first disc, 2000’s “Hopeless Lullaby,” was inspired by an even less-likely locale: Duluth, Minnesota. “It was an inspired dream,” they write on their MySpace page, recalling the time spent eating blueberry pancakes, playing Frisbee, and “jamming to Steely Dan on the radio.”

Before stifling a yawn, consider an introduction made to another Winter Blanket song: “It’s sort of a cock-rocker, if you know what I mean … Feel free to fondle freely on this next one.”