"Psychedelia is all about experiencing sounds and images that your brain wouldn't be able to comprehend under normal circumstances," my father will occasionally tell me, a mad look lingering in his eyes.

I usually respond that I understand, and beg him to please turn off "Echoes." I don't care if the climax is just around the corner; it's exacerbating my vertigo.

To my father, psychedelia is and always has been a medium of mind-expansion, generally accompanied by a fish-bowl-generated light show. While I'll admit I've enjoyed such things in the past, I tend to gravitate more toward the gentler side of the psychedelic experience. And, despite my father's rather rigid definition of the genre, I've always found it's a rather forgiving term, lending itself to a wide array of sounds. Droning acid rock, epic electronic manifestos, child-like folk fables, distorted garage rock - these things can all be comfortably placed under the smiley psychedelic cartoon umbrella.

If The New Frontier Lounge were a contestant on Iron Chef, their bill Friday might be referred to as "psychedelia - three ways." Representing three distinct but, I think, valid, sides of psychedelic music will be Egg Plant, the Drug Purse, and the Nightgowns.

Let's take Egg Plant, for instance. The band reflects, to me, psychedelia the way it existed in the decade leading up to its renaissance. Utilizing the sleepy, genial sounds of folk, country, and ragtime, Egg Plant is psychedelic in the way people like John Prine or Arlo Guthrie were psychedelic. They don't aim to melt your brain or expand your mind, but rather to take your mind out for little while - not on a permanent vacation, just for a sunny walk through the park, maybe stopping to feed the ducks.

Though I've never tried it, I imagine Egg Plant would provide the perfect accompaniment to the too-bright morning after a night of heavy drinking, quietly coaxing your brain into getting up and walking to the coffee shop. Like Prine and Guthrie, it's Americana that's just a little closer to real life, and with a genuine wonder and delight in the world we inhabit.

Up until relatively recently, Egg Plant was a Tacoma band. Perhaps they still are, in spirit. Lead singer Luke Short ended up in Portland by necessity. When the person producing his record moved to Portland, Short had to follow him to finish the recording. After spending time in the Rose City, he decided to stay.

"I find it pretty easy (in Portland) to, basically, throw a rock and hit a guitar player, you know?" says Short. It's a helpful feature to have in a city, especially in Egg Plant's case. The band's lineup has seemed to exist in a state of flux since Short found the original lineup through craigslist.

So, now, in the other corners of psychedelia will be The Drug Purse and the Nightgowns. The Drug Purse is, by design, the archetypal psych-rock band. Their songs are hazy and acid-soaked, and best experienced live. To hear a string of Drug Purse songs back-to-back with an audience, Jason Freet's voice intoning below the fuzz of the amps, is to achieve the maximum hypnotic effect of the band.

The Nightgowns play pop music, but with a dreamy curiosity, and a kind of desperate connection to emotion that usually ends with adolescence. Tragedy and joy are everyday events in a Nightgowns song, and are no less meaningful because of it. One gets the impression, listening to Trevor Dickson and Cody Jones, they'd like nothing more than to take out their brains and hold them in their hands - because they feel so darn cool.

Then, quite naturally, they'd run off and play on the jungle gym.

Have you ever wanted to unravel your brain, tie it into a lasso, and use it to catch a cloud?

Sorry.

What I'm trying to say is this is a show you need to see. Egg Plant, The Drug Purse and the Nightgowns all excrete dewy droplets of pure love and understanding. If I were you, I'd use this opportunity to get up close with them, and hope some of it rubs off.

[The New Frontier Lounge, with the Nightgowns, and The Drug Purse, Friday, March. 5, 9 p.m., cover TBA, 301 E. 25th St., Tacoma, 253.572.4020]