Karen O goes a bit mad while Brian Chase looks on. Nick Zinner plays...Karen screams. The mild-mannered Aaron Hemphill. The not at all mild-mannered Angus Andrews. Oh Kim... Oh Thurston...

There are advantages to living in the middle of nowhere. Back in NYC, getting tickets to any one of these three bands would require advanced planning, to say the least. Sonic Youth/Liars dates in the city -- without the divine Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- were sold out weeks ahead. In laid-back Northampton, people were plunking their $20 down at the door. Even as Karen O's voice emerged offstage around 8:00 o'clock, it was still possible to shoulder right up to the stage.

Which is where you want to be to witness the rebirth of the rock star, 2002 style. Forget the "Rock is back" bullshit. It's been here the whole time. What's been missing is the full-voltage star power, the kind of outsized personalities that light up stages and transform crowds with the force of their ultra-personas. It's not missing anymore. Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Angus Andrew of the Liars bring it back in spades.

Dressed in tights, a strippy-strapped batiked shell, sneakers and several dozen bangle bracelets, and sporting a fringe of black bangs that stopped just short of her razor-sharp cheekbones, Karen O took the stage hopping, pointing, pouting and shimmying. She danced like a little girl to her big sister's records, all bounce and joy and certainty that you will find her irresistible. She panted and keened on "Miles Away", she did a backbend to the floor during the screaming part of "Art Star", she was punky, precious, "a danger to herself" in "Mystery Girl". She was never still, never boring, never ordinary -- not even for a second -- and you could literally hardly take your eyes off her.

Nick Zinner, the YYYs' guitarist, stood off to the side, cooly ceding the spotlight but stoking the musical fire with angular, Gang of Four guitar work. He stood stock still for most of the set, stealing only an occasional glance at the crowd that Karen O played like an accordion. When she pogoed over into picture range with Zinner, he backed away quickly. He took out a pocket camera at one point, and turned the tables on the audience by taking their pictures.

Drummer Brian Chase put a thundering beat under the YYYs' punk stylings, pounding out that caroming-off-the-walls rhythm that underlies the band's sound.

Midway through the set, a banner reading "Happy Birthday Karen O" emerged in the darkness. The birthday girl, glowing with happiness and excitement, dedicated one song to "my boyfriend, Angus, who I love so much", and another to the girls who made the banner. She walked off the stage with it wrapped around her shoulders.

Okay, I said to myself at this point, that was amazing. Nothing can top that. But 20 minutes later when the Liars took the stage, I understood that I had been mistaken.

On record, the Liars offer a mix of bone-shaking rhythm, discordant tones and evocative lyrics. On stage, they add the dynamic, very tall presence of vocalist Angus Andrews, played against the quiet intensity of guitarist Aaron Hemphill. They're an odd couple. Andrews struts across the stage in groin-grazing white low-riders. Hemphill has a baggy sweater over a button-down shirt. Andrews leans out over the stage, pointing, thumping the mike against his chest, flopping and preening. Hemphill stands back to the audience, coaxing a squall of sound out of the speakers. Andrews jerks and spasms as if the music were a live electric current coursing through his body; twice roadies scurried out after him to repair fallen mike stands and tangled cords. Hemphill looks like a graduate student even as he nearly swallows the microphone. They are supported by the maniacally funky bass of Pat Nature and the second of three really excellent drummers this evening, Ron Albertson.

The band opened with a surreal and beautiful mix of mutated voice and breath and furious guitar that I later found was "Pillars Were Hollow And Filled With Candy So We Tore Them Down" from the new EP Fins to Make Us More Fishlike. Then they hit one of the highlights of They Threw Us in a Trench and Put a Monument on Top with "Loose Nuts on the Velodrome". Its pounding chorus of "They cut me up, they cut me up, they cut me up, in medical school" remains inexplicable live, but strangely powerful. The band also performed an electric version of "The Garden Was Crowded and Outside", along with some new songs I didn't recognize. Their last song, which on record runs over half an hour, was "This Dust Makes That Mud". It's kind of repetitive on the record, but in concert it becomes a mesmerizing platform for experimentation. At the end, Angus and Aaron lowered their microphones into the audience, offering us ordinary joes a chance to moan or scream or sing along with the sparse beat.

The Liars left the stage, and again I thought, that was great, but no way is anyone going to top them. I know this is repetitive, but again, I was dead wrong. Sonic Youth, now augmented with Jim O'Rourke, was consistently astonishing, whether in the lyrical interplay of Murray Street's "Empty Page" and "Rain on Tin" or the punkier stridence of Washing Machine's "Skip Tracer". The set leaned heavily on new material, including not only the aforementioned cuts but also "Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style" and "Sympathy for the Strawberry". Never fear; they also left room older tunes, like "Kissability" from Daydream Nation.

What's interesting about Sonic Youth is how effortlessly they play off each other. During part of "Rain on Tin", Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore were playing dueling dissonances, shifting slightly in time to the music. The two had their backs to each other, and yet you could almost see the connective thought linking them, without even a shared glance.

Every Sonic Youth song erupted into a swell of gorgeous noise, the sound of guitars bending and arching into new forms as we listened. I was standing next to a very young couple -- teenagers, I'd say -- who started tongue-kissing every time the feedback got intense. It sounds funny, but there is something very sexual about feedback, the touch-me-there escalation that explodes and implodes until it quite suddenly stops. There were moments when you felt that you were inside the big bang watching the universe begin, and others when the beauty and structure of the guitar work sounded almost classical.

Sonic Youth played for nearly an hour, with Kim, Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore trading vocals, lighting incendiary riffs and passing them burning from hand to hand. They are as possessed by the music as the two twenty-something bands that opened the set. In the wings, you could just glimpse the two earlier guitarists, Zinner and Hemphill, watching -- as stunned and overawed as all us regular people in the audience.

Three bands, all different, all completely enslaved to the music they were making. It was a hell of a night -- and if you ever get a chance to see any of these bands, take it from me, you've got to go.

Article and photos by Jennifer Kelly.