The 40 Watt looks like a lot of rock clubs in the South. It's a big, airy dive (way bigger than the dives you have to patronize to see rock bands in the North) that's part converted auto garage, part church basement -- and thanks to a tenuous tiki, Christmas lights and disco-ball dicor -- part "M*A*S*H" canteen. Budweiser and Shiner are only two bucks a bottle, and the bartenders look like Wilco: rock-scene lifers, and damn proud of it. It doesn't sound like much, but if your town doesn't have at least one place like this, you should probably move.

Pulling into Athens late, I caught the tail end of Wednesday night's Expo acts, including Japancakes, a local five-piece that is currently doing for the lap steel what Stereolab did for the Moog a few years back. Japancakes are one of the more hypnotic, sublime and even mature acts on the Kindercore label, which might explain why they pulled in a way smaller crowd than they deserved. As the band ran through a handful of the eight-minute epics that make up their "I Can See Dallas" LP and "Down the Elements" EP, a large video display at stage left revealed loops of silhouetted trees and telephone wires, shot from below at dusk in a passing automobile.

They were pretty good, but for my money, they didn't even touch the 8-Track Gorilla.

Simply put, the 8-Track Gorilla is just that: some guy in a gorilla suit with an old portable eight-track player around his neck, singing along in a deadpan Ben Stein voice over whatever tape happens to be catching his fancy at the moment. On this particular night, that meant some old Kinks stuff (including, appropriately enough, "Ape Man"), a rousing rendition of the Stones' "Happy" and a sexy duet of some "Pina Colada Song"-esque '70s tune with a saucy blond Goth chick that veered from strangely tender to nearly queasy making. The 8-Track Gorilla was not so much a proper Kindercore act as a joke that seems to have mutated far beyond whatever stoned fantasy provoked him into existence in the first place. Audience reactions to the guy -- whose set ran a full 40 minutes, just like the sets of the rest of the Kindercore artists -- vacillated wildly, but to me, watching a guy in a gorilla suit sing along with Keith Richards after being in a car for 13 hours seemed just about right.

I loved it, couldn't get enough of the guy -- I mean, Gorilla. And I wasn't alone. All week, my traveling companion, Martin, would wander around the 40 Watt Club, secretly staring at the hands of men to see if they revealed the 8-Track Gorilla's telltale black nail polish. It became something of a collective obsession for the both of us. Which, I suppose, is why we went down to Athens in the first place.

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Twisting, in the wind, by the pool

Sooner or later, even Martin and I knew that as our snickering about the man in the ape suit fell away we were going to have to socialize with our own kind. For once in our lives, we were in a town overrun with indie, a town where, at least for this week, striped T-shirts flew like freak flags and the stars in the sky from any direction spelled twee. For maybe the first time ever, soaked in the mid-August heat, there was a confederacy of twee. It was nerve-racking even just walking down the street and seeing people who looked just like me.

So imagine our surprise on Thursday afternoon when we went to take a dip in the hotel's pool and found, to our mutual shock, titillation and dismay, some kind of twee pool party. This made sense when you thought about it; unlike South by Southwest or the CMJ music conference, the expo held no daytime events. Where else were we going to go during the day? Still, this was alarming. One, twee kids have little, tiny bodies well into their 20s and carry for them a kind of skinny shame usually reserved for anorexics, which makes it hard to catch any sun at all. Two, to venture into the pool, which would mean at least in part removing the two layers of coverup clothing just about all of us wore, you had to strip quickly and quietly down to your swimsuit and get into the pool in deep enough water before anyone noticed you. This was all but impossible.

Instead, most of us just sat by the pool, inspecting the badges on each other's backpacks, pretending to read and simultaneously praying for and dreading the moment when we'd all finally introduce ourselves on this, the first day of indie-pop summer camp.

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The Rushmore Players, aka Of Montreal

On most nights of the Expo, a band called Of Montreal appeared onstage as either themselves or as the backing band for another project on an average of twice a night. We saw principal members of the Athens group participating in sets by the Marshmallow Coast, Summer Hymns and the Great Lakes -- as well as during their own set, which bridged the gap between "Magical Mystery Tour"-era Beatles and dadaist high school theater. The band is part of the second wave of groups in the Elephant 6 collective of neo-retro pop bands. Engineered by the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel, the E6 collective is split mostly between Denver and Athens and is to indie pop today what Death Row was to hip-hop in the mid-'90s.

The omnipresent Of Montreal were both a blessing, when they worked and the bands they helped came off as something more than the total of their influences, and a curse, when it just seemed that Of Montreal's loopiness was getting spread thin. But either way, the Of Montreal bands seemed to be the most succinct statement of the brand of fresh-faced (if only marginally inventive) guitar pop Kindercore has been going after. In stark relief to the willfully juvenile stuff the label has been passing off for a few years with bands like Masters of the Hemisphere and Kincaid -- the former of which, for instance, has offered a free comic book with its new album, a concept piece that seems like a direct lift of the Jim Henson show "Fraggle Rock" -- Of Montreal delivered that kind of exuberance without any of the cringe-worthy infantilism that makes this kind of thing so hard to take for so many people. What's more telling about the level of craft in Of Montreal's flights of fancy is that, note for note, the music sounds even more youthful than that of their contemporaries, "Partridge Family" tambourines, junior-high nasal vocals and all. And yet, it doesn't grate; during their set, even the old farts in the crowd like me had to pogo just a little. I mean, these days, how many chances do you get?

And if the new signings are any indication, the label seems to be getting better and better. Norway's Kings of Convenience took the stage like a Euro Smothers Brothers, punctuating quiet, winsome tunes in the manner of Simon and Garfunkel or Nick Drake with a snappy stage presence that suggested, for the first time on the Expo stage, that here was a pair of guys actually interested in craft. Another new signing that debuted on Saturday night was San Francisco's Call and Response (C.A.R.), which invoked the Jackson 5 and the Mamas and the Papas way more than, say, early twee prototype groups like Heavenly or Beat Happening. Self-assured, sassy and with the chops and harmonies to match, Call and Response turned the earnest, honest approach Kindercore has been hammering away at for years into something that was heartbreaking, uplifting and pretty all at once: pure pop for now people.

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