Kevin Bronson on September 14th, 2012

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Silversun Pickups’ concert on Thursday night at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium was all about expectancy.

The Silver Lake quartet’s fervent SoCal fanbase – seeing SSPU for the first time since its third album “Neck of the Woods” was released in May – was hungry for a characteristically explosive show. And the Pickups themselves, along with that faithful, looked forward to bidding a fond farewell, albeit temporarily, to bassist Nikki Monninger, who is pregnant with twin girls and was playing her final show before taking maternity leave.

• ||| Photos by Carl Pocket

The crowd at the Civic got some of the former and a lot of the latter.

Monninger, bump on her tummy, bedecked stylishly in a short dress and in typically high spirits, was feted throughout the show. “Those aren’t quesadillas in there,” joked singer-guitarist Brian Aubert, who ended the show by doing a little waltz with his longtime bandmate. Meanwhile, Monninger’s fill-in, Sarah Negahdari from the Happy Hollows, was stationed sidestage playing the whole show into her monitor as a way of getting up to speed for SSPU’s upcoming tour, which kicks off Friday in Las Vegas.

The show itself was hit-and-miss, owing mostly to the hangar-like Civic and its barn-like acoustics. The darker, moodier material from “Neck of the Woods” relies heavily on the electronic textures of keyboardist Joe Lester, and most of those turned to mush in echo-laden auditorium. The ambient stylings of support band School of Seven Bells suffered largely the same fate, although the siren vocals of Alejandra Deheza occasional found the desired haunting effect. Aussie quartet Atlas Genius, kicking off the night, fared best with their exuberant, Britpop-flavored anthems.

The Pickups were barely firing on all cylinders by the time they played the new album’s first single, “Bloody Mary (Nerve Endings),” three songs in. But they hit their stride midway through with the bass-driven second single “The Pit” and finished the main set with a roar, with “Panic Switch” off their sophomore album, the new stomp “Dots and Dashes (Enough Already)” and their signature “Lazy Eye.”

The encore was fit for lifers, ending with “Kissing Families,” for those who remember the old days when Tanya Laden played the cello interlude live, and “Well Thought Out Twinkles,” with its cascading guitars and drummer Christopher Guanlao’s crashing high hat. And there were plenty of lifers at the Civic too – former bandmates, roommates, tourmates and denizens of the scene that spawned SSPU.

What there wasn’t (and this reporter humbly begs your pardon if he failed to spot someone in the crowd) were any representatives of the Pickups’ current label, Dangerbird Records, whose hierachy changed earlier Thursday with the exit of co-founder Jeff Castelaz. It’s virtually a foregone conclusion that SSPU will have a new label home by the time album No. 4 comes round. Apparently, though, Santa Monica wasn’t in anybody’s neck of the woods.