[what cover jinx?] Night Fruit return, perform @ Brighton Music Hall tonight

Maybe there is something to that age-old Boston Phoenix local band cover jinx! After defying gravity and gracing the front page of our lil' alt-weekly back in January's "Class of 2011: Boston's 11 Best New Bands" feature, NIGHT FRUIT pretty much disappeared.

Several of the other bands featured, from RIBS to Stereo Telescope to to Banditas to Doomstar to Dirty Dishes, have become must-see players on our always-blossoming local scene, but the Allston-based whatever-gaze trio apparently hit some rough waters, and singer/guitarist Amanda Dellevigne ghosted town, resurfaced in a land-locked state, and joined up with the alt-rock ladies of Vanity Theft. The Ohio-based band self-describes their sound as "somewhere between the work of Sleater-Kinney and the Ting Tings," and well shit, that's actually a bit more criminal than stealing away from us the singer of Night Fruit!

Thankfully, after several months away, Dellevigne is back in town -- our gossip spies even caught her dining at Bagel Rising yesterday with one of the dudes in Young Adults, another of our Class of 2011 picks -- and after a warm-up house show last weekend, tonight Night Fruit returns to the nightclub circuit at Brighton Music Hall. They're opening up for Gold Motel and Farewell Continental, the latter of which is some side project featuring members of Motion City Soundtrack. Doors are at 6pm and the show starts at 7. 

In a nice twist of coincidental fate, the aforementioned Vanity Theft makes their own Boston debut June 8 at Church, on a bill with Andre Obin and People At Parties (ex-Von Iva). Finally, we can all hug it out and get on with our lives.Needless to say, we're pretty happy to have Night Fruit back and around town.

If you need a refresher on Night Fruit's overal awesomeness, here's what we said about our beloved trio back in January: One of the drawbacks in our current culture of immediacy is that bands get thrust into the spotlight before they have a chance to flesh out their sound. If artist development is truly a thing of the past for major labels, perhaps the same can be said for the underground in a landscape of flipcams, twitpics, and party photos. In July 2010, when Cambridge trio Night Fruit released online a demo for their Triangles EP, we posted the entire thing to our "On the Download" blog. A few weeks later, they got the "Cellars by Starlight" treatment. Maybe that demo wasn't supposed to stick the way it did, but with its root gripped by notable "S"-ness (Swirlies, Slowdive, Swervedriver), the ambient, groggy, almost shoegazing dream-pop whirl of Night Fruit's guitar-buzzed sound became one of the freshest in the city. Forget about hanging a hat on new material. It'll be interesting to watch this infant band grow and develop their sound in 2011 — the results should be a hazy shade of spectacular.