Much more than meets the eye

The cool thing about normal-looking people is you never really know.

Take the Fiery Furnaces and Ted Leo, who shared a bill at the jam-packed Echo on Friday. Furnaces siblings Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger look like average grad students, while Leo could be that guy in the office down the hall. But their performances revealed the kind of eccentric takes that keeps rock fresh.

The Brooklyn-based Friedbergers, augmented by two musicians, almost seemed to have their own musical language. Drawing on their enticing debut album, “Gallowsbird’s Bark,” the Furnaces’ mini-epics first echoed Ween’s fractured children’s songs and then turned to inside-out blues recalling P.J. Harvey, with Eleanor’s plain-spoken delivery adding a dark intensity to obsessive lyrics. The key, though, was a hard-to-define sense of otherness about Eleanor, as if there’s something she’s not telling us.

There’s no such mystique to East Coast punk and power-pop veteran Leo, who wore his heart (and his ‘70s-’80s influences) on his sleeve as he boisterously fronted his two-man backing band, the Pharmacists.

“Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone” lyrically tips a hat to ska revivalists the Specials, while sounding like Thin Lizzy. On “The High Party,” verses evoked early Joe Jackson, the chorus early Sparks. But that bared heart is strong enough to trump any derivativeness.

If only most pop figures were this normal.

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The Fiery Furnaces

Where: The Fold at the Silverlake Lounge, 2906 Sunset Blvd., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.

Price: $8

Contact: (323) 666-2407