Stripmall Ballads at the Velvet Lounge Thursday, January 20

Here are a few things I know about Stripmall Ballads’ frontman, Phillips Saylor: that he invented an experimental guitar technique called orthopolytonal banjo singing. That one year, he tried to use an amplifier at a songwriters’ circle at the stuffy Washington Folk Festival but didn’t ask permission, and got himself banned from the annual gathering. That last fall he wrote, directed, and performed a folk opera called The Perfect Pipe Bomb, involving a full band, 10-foot-tall puppets, and a four-person chorus. And that his band’s song “Woman With a Black Eye”—recorded in and containing the street sounds of an unspecified neighborhood in Northeast D.C.—is the goddamn saddest thing I heard last year. I hope they play it tonight.

STRIPMALL BALLADS PERFORMS WITH DADDY LION AND PETTICOAT TEAROOM AT 9 P.M. AT THE VELVET LOUNGE, 915 U ST. NW. $8. (202) 462-3213.

Correction: Due to a reporting error, the article originally misidentified Stripmall Ballads' folk opera The Perfect Pipe Bomb as The Perfect Time Bomb.

Our Readers Say

Daddy Lion, playing a solo set, goes on 9pm sharp.

Be there or miss what critics are calling the closest thing to a true musical hybrid between an octopus and a duckbill platypus.
From the show's facebook page, it seems there's going to be some crazy cupcake fight at that show?
RSVP today for the Great Cupcake Massacre!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=138488976208554
the cupcake anti-social

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