Brit-Rock at Brighton Music Hall

The experience of Brit-rockers Dry the River’s first Boston show following the release of Shallow Beds, the bands’ first full-length album, was one rooted firmly in the viscera Saturday. In the opening, Brooklyn-based Port St. Willow established an impermeable melancholy air built from gentle licks of guitar, billowing waves of low synth and the warm drone of backing vocals. Frontman Nick Principe’s vocals rose above it all, high and ethereal. Drums — sometimes subtle, sometimes robust — moved the songs forward with the cool motion of an electric train, an aural Acela. The pieces were long and loping, loosely structured and rough around the edges, but rendered honestly in a tender inelegance. With their plaintive sound, Port St. Willow weighed our soul with a sigh and added a few more lugubrious pounds.

Anyone rocked sleep-side by the first set was wrenched from their reverie the very moment Indiana four-piece Houndmouth took to their instruments. Feel-good folk rock packed in short and sweet songs exploded out at the audience with all joy and fervor humanly conceivable. Simple and repetitive songwriting was enhanced and amplified by the inspired instrumentation the band builds around it; they were all equal participants in the joyful noise they created. The Nord keyboard blasted organ for their third number, “Penitentiary,” a song that roared through a country-gospel-esque chorus and searing guitar solo. It was a demonstration, repeated often throughout the set, of the perfect balance of influences that make them folk rock that rocks. Houndmouth deserves every ounce of renown that I am certain they’ll come to attain, and if every show they play is just as energizing and — above all — fun as this, they will be attaining it very soon.

After casting the Hall into darkness for an inexplicable four minutes, lights rose and Dry the River took the stage. The venue was abuzz with excitement, reflected in the wide eyes of Peter Liddle, the band’s barefooted front man. He reached for the mic, setlist scrawled in sharpie along his left arm. “You look incredible,” he told us, and off they went. Their sound began bundled up, tightly wound in a sphere of potential energy that slowly unfolded in their layered harmonies and bassist Scott Miller’s broad gyrations. Their voices together had the sound of old, smooth glass — a clear and round quality like a human harmonica. Equally as emotive, they replaced the energetic whimsy of Houndmouth with impassioned sincerity, though based on the visual alone, one could assume that this was a heavy metal show; a fiddle will go unnoticed in the presence of head-banging. They touched on softer sides, subsiding into songs such as “Bible Belt” and an even quieter number they performed while standing in the middle of the crowd, our attempts to harmonize swelling warmly below their own polyphony. Their final song was the mellow “Lion’s Den,” which, as per the status quo, did not stay that way. It exploded into a rapturous euphony of song and light worthy of the second coming of Jesus, who didn’t show.