The Virgins at Bowery Ballroom

Guitarist/vocalist Donald Cumming began writing songs in his New York apartment, then recruited friends to fill out the band that would be called the Virgins in 2006. Before long, the Virgins released a debut album and gained some national popularity when the CW show Gossip Girl featuring five of their songs in one episode. The Virgins began getting high profile opening slots at area music clubs and at many American, British and European summer music festivals, along with television appearances on the Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Last Call with Carson Daly. Cumming revamped the band’s line-up last year and Cult Records released a second Virgins album, Strike Gently, on March 12.

At the Bowery Ballroom tonight, the Virgins demonstrated how skillfully honed its soft indie pop dance music can be performed while remaining faithful to its core identity as a rock band. Taking a page from the Lou Reed, Bob Dylan and Dire Straits style of almost talking the lyrics (Cumming even wore a Mark Knopler-era head band) and injecting funky dance grooves and edgy guitar licks, the Virgins live found the thread that sewed together the band’s older pop songs with the newer folk-rock derived songs. The band showed onstage that it is still maturing its hybrid sound, but Cumming, guitarist Xan Aird, bassist Max Kamins and drummer John Eatherly are finding their way to a broader audience than the limited teen audience that the band cultivated in its primal stage.