When I first started writing about music in Tacoma, the landscape was almost entirely metal. You couldn’t walk a block without running into a goatee. You couldn’t chuck an empty Pabst can without hitting a middle age white guy strapped with child support payments and a mean affinity for Scandinavian Black Metal.



My how times have changed.



Sure, child support is still rampant in our fair city, and goatees are in no short supply, but the landscape is different. There’s a young pulse, an infectious pang, a feeling of sonic possibility — meandering from synthesizer charm to understated indie rock — that’s breathed life into this place we call home.



The very personification of this musical shift is the Nightgowns — Tacoma’s pop darlings and a band capable of lifting us out of the dark ages. By all accounts, the process is underway.



But it’s going to take more than just homegrown talent. To truly turn the page in Tacoma, it’s going to take venues and a scene capable of attracting indie pop goodness from far and wide.



This is where the New Frontier comes in.



San Francisco’s Birds and Batteries is, quite simply, one helluva multifaceted keyboard-fueled pop act — a blend of everything good about pop music shaded with a touch of twang and cowboy five o’clock shadow. The band’s last full-length release, I’ll Never Sleep Again, is evidence, wowing with swirls of synth majesty just as much as subtle, classic, Neil Young-like undertones.



“Growing up, I was somewhat of a headphone escapist. So with everything I do in terms of recording, I try to give people a place to go within the layers and sounds, a sort of world,” says Birds and Batteries’ lead man, Mike Sempert, who also reports the band will be releasing an EP, Up to No Good, this fall — and is planning the release of a third full length album in Spring 2010.



But before any of that, Birds and Batteries will hit The New Frontier Saturday for a show with the Nightgowns and Pablo Trucker.



“I’ve heard nothing but good things about Tacoma,” says Sempert.



Let’s show him he’s heard right.



[The New Frontier, The Nightgowns with Birds and Batteries, Pablo Trucker, 9 p.m., $5, 301 E. 25th Street, Tacoma, 253.572.4020]