At the Biltmore Cabaret on Friday, November 19

There was a time not all that long ago when the idea of Thee Oh Sees packing out the Biltmore, as the San Francisco outfit did Friday night, seemed improbable.

After a traumatizing experience with a Canadian border guard in 2008 (the Thee Oh Sees were on tour with Nurses, who reportedly, after getting stopped at Peace Arch, spent five days in jail), frontman John Dwyer balked at the idea of coming back to Terminal City.

Apparently, a few years and a complimentary plane ticket is all the magnetic ringleader needed to reunite with his Vancouver fans, whose numbers have certainly grown since the quartet blew the roof off Pub 340 way back when. While recent endorsements from Pitchfork and the like have helped put the lo-fi garage-rawkers on the radar, the full house at the Biltmore can be attributed to something else entirely.

A new breed of hipster has obviously stumbled onto Thee Oh Sees; 50 percent of the sweaty, first-pumping Main Street wannabes on this night looked like it was still in high school when the band last hit town. Said audience members may have been sporting bushy Magnum P.I. ”˜staches in honour of Movember. But not even their over-the-top facial hair could obscure the fact that, in all likelihood, they’d recently rung in their 19th birthdays with Honey Dipp and the rest of the gals over at No. 5 Orange.

And it appeared that these newly-minted “adults” were eager to make full use of their legal-drinking-age status, as the messy crowd crammed against the low-slung stage was out of its collective mind during Thee Oh Sees’ wild set.

No surprise. Dwyer, with his Justin Bieber–worthy coif and cherry-red guitar embellished with sliver block stickers listing his initials, has a way of making anyone freak the fuck out. There were plenty of glassy stares from PBR-hoisting fans, and a near-comatose Jack Daniel’s zombie eventually hit the floor, but it was hard to blame anyone for getting so wasted. Even an audience of devout straight-edgers from the Church of Ian MacKaye would surely have reacted with the same maniacal enthusiasm.

Whipping through cockeyed psych tunes that won with muddy reverb and catchy throwback pop melodies, the band—which owes just as much of its party-rocking vibe to stickman Mike Shoun, bassist Petey Dammit and singer-keyboardist Brigid Dawson—detonated the raucous room with roaring, fuzzed-out numbers like “Block of Ice”, “Grease”, and “Mega-Feast”.

As the night drew to a close, Thee Oh Sees graciously (and perhaps obligatorily) thanked Vancouver’s own garage kings Dead Ghosts for kicking things off with a set of wayward southern-fried jams. Dwyer and company then rolled out a mega-rendition of the title track off their new album, Warm Slime. As it turned out, this track stood in for the encore, which likely would have irked some folks if they hadn’t been so preoccupied entangling their limbs from the sticky throng of bodies on the dance floor.