After the whole Rolling Stone-Camel Cigarettes indie music debacle a while back (read more here), I didn’t expect the fine folks at the famed tobacco company to have much more influence in the music world, especially the less mainstream sphere. Friday night’s Camel-sponsored show headlined by indie-and-mainstream darlings Spoon and featuring The Walkmen and White Rabbits at The Vic Theater proved the R.J. Reynolds business still has pull in the popular music realm. The Vic resembled some sort of bizarre nicotine carnival, complete with flat-screen TV monitors, a t-shirt pressing station, various tents, Camel ads and lights, a strange place promoting cigarettes but forcing smokers to head outside to puff. Even though the atmosphere seemed bizarre and the audience featured more unironic hats than ironic ones (the ultimate sign Spoon has made it, though), the music itself didn’t suffer from the environment, all three bands delivering their brands of rock excellently to the sold-out crowd.

Opener White Rabbits cluttered the stage for their set, wheeling out a piano, two drum kits and six people onto the tiny spot carved out for them amongst the other group’s equipment. Every item proved vital though in the New York City band’s performance, each instrument an essential piece for the band’s musical locomotion, every song shooting forward breathlessly, rarely slowing down. The early songs in White Rabbit’s set powered through on both drumsets being pounded on and piano sounding like the sort of thing you’d hear in a saloon in Dodge City while cowboys get into a brawl over a game of poker. White Rabbits sound fine with all these instruments, but the six-piece sounded best when they cut back a little. The two best songs, “While We Go Dancing” and “The Plot,” relied on only one chugging drumset, but sounding the most danceable and tight of their brief set. The young band won the crowd over, getting the masses to jump around to their piano-driven rock. As one middle-aged man behind me put it, “they really impressed me.”

Fellow Big Apple band The Walkmen didn’t sound nearly as tight as White Rabbits, but that’s what makes them so special. The five-man band combine guitars, organs and drums to create a somewhat sloppy, hazy sounding wall of noise that serves as an appropriate backdrop for lead singer Hamilton Leithauser’s mumbled-and-shrieked lyrics. If The Hold Stedy make music to celebrate inebriation, The Walkmen write songs about drinking to drive away bad memories, but ending up feeling worse about them. The group covered material stretching across their discography, hitting on material from as far back as their self-titled debut circa 2001 (”Wake Up”) to new songs entirely. The Walkmen relied on build-up, most of their songs stumbling around while Leithauser deployed his Bono-meets-Dylan-sounding screech, eventually erupting into blasts of guitar and emotion. They sounded best when they just rocked out, such as on “Little House of Savages,” where Leithauser’s disorganized voice met the perfect companion in eyes-forward guitar and gunfire-fast drums. The Walkmen were definitely the least conventional of the night’s three acts, and delivered a sloppily great performance.

Austin’s Spoon have arguably the richest body of work of any rock-outfit this decade, and the fact I left Friday night’s show thinking about which hits they hadn’t played (and coming to the realization they had a lot more excellent tunes not displayed Friday) is credit to how impressive their discography is. The band focused on material from their two latest and most commercially successful affairs (2005’s Gimmie Fiction and last year’s wonderful Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga) with a smattering of older tunes throughout. Most of Spoon’s set saw the foursome translating the rocking tunes of their studio work to the stage flawlessly, songs like the strut-worthy “I Turn My Camera On” and laid-back “Don’t U Evah” sounding just like the album versions. Still, Spoon is renowned for their LP experimentation, from pop minimalism (2002’s Kill the Moonlight) to instrument risks (last year’s horn-heavy Ga), and watching them work around that live turned out to be the show’s most interesting highlight. Kill the Moonlight tracks suffered from being two raucous, betraying the original version’s stripped down-ness. But “You Got Yr Cherry Bomb” and “The Underdog,” from Ga, sounded better than ever, keyboards filling in for the horns excellently. Spoon did show strokes of experimentation throughout, most prevalently through vocal delay affects that popped up in many of the songs. Show stealer “The Ghost of you Lingers” sounded incredible, ghostly instrumentation joining lead singer Britt Daniel’s voice to create the most engrossing song of the night.

Even though Camel Cigarettes presence felt bizarre and a little annoying, it’s hard to complain about a show where all three bands showcased their skills so well and to such an excited crowd. Sure, the display cases out front showing cigarettes may have sucked, but I can handle the commercialization if I get a Spoon performance as good as this one.