I saw Engines of Aggression, Sister Machine Gun, and Course of Empire at the 9:30 club the past weekend. Engines of Aggression, who had a new album out on August 30, opened and were by far the best of the three bands (maybe it's because I'm familiar with their stuff), and that's saying a lot, because they're not different from your average rock band. Still, the Engines have some good tunes and good lyrics. They played a lot of stuff from their album Speak including Slippin' Away, Society Says, and Flowers. They didn't play On the Outside, and that bugged me since that's my favourite tune by them. They did hand out cool stickers though.
Sister Machine Gun came on next and they were quite decent, on level with EoA, but the keyboardist/singer (who was quite good as a musician) was spitting water on the audience and I thought this was dumb. They were quite good, however.
Course of Empire was next, and by this time the 9:30 club was getting too loud for me. It seems the trend these days is to play the music loudly and have bad acoustics so as to ruin as many ears as possible. My ears were ringing for a whole day (yep, permanent damage was being done). They didn't impress me any more than SMG or EoA, and we left. They did have the coolest t-shirts though.