If folk music’s prime currency is authenticity, Langhorne Slim might well earn some crooked eyebrows. Classically trained at the SUNY-Purchase conservatory, Sean Scolnik donned loafers and floppy hat and named himself after his hometown in the tradition of all those rail-hoppin’ ramblers who used to do that. The blogosphere gobbled up this aesthetic and and have cast Slim in the role of Guthrie-Dylan inheritor he came dressed to play.

Really, Slim doesn’t make music like that at all. His music is much more poptimistic, with an evangelical energy that has led some critics to call his music religious (and not in the way Bob Dylan equated Woody Guthrie’s music with religion). Slim’s lyrics lunge, albeit passionately, with a blade that is shinier than it is sharp. Cat Stevens, with his spiritual conceit, is an apter analog—or the Avett Brothers, with whom Slim has toured.

The irony, of course, is that once Langhorne Slim is amputated from the Guthrie-Dylan continuum the question of authenticity ceases to pose a problem, and we can appreciate Scolnik for what he is: An upbeat kid with a folk-gospel bent who makes dynamic, non-threatening, thoroughly enjoyable pop music.

Langhorne Slim plays tonight at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hotel with Dawes, left-coast country rock act whom Rolling Stone last week certified as “breaking,” and who occasionally go Steinbeck all over their blog. Doors at 8 p.m.; $12-$14.

Nebeker says that while he doesn’t necessarily see the group as an extension of the American folk tradition (his songwriting idol was Billy Corgan, not Dylan) his music very much of a piece with the band’s own roots. “I think we wanted to make music that would fit in that idea of moving out to a cannery that was built in the late 1800’s,” he said in a phone interview. “We wanted it to fit there. And we also wanted it to fit in the land and the towns going down the West Coast.”

In other words: small, organic, honest. “Maybe about half the songs on the album I wasn’t even going to share with people, because I was sort of going through a phase writing songs that [only] made full sense to me,” Nebeker said. “I’m always surprised when it translates.” Sure, the lyrics on 3 Rounds and a Sound can be impenetrable. But the album’s tone requires little translation; in its melancholy warmth we glimpse love, guilt, and regret—indeed, Blind Pilot’s stripped-down ballads are destined to inspire reckless romantic impulses among audiences of whatever Fox Searchlight film inevitably features the band on its soundtrack.

Happily, you don’t have to wait that long; Blind Pilot plays tonight with the Low Anthem at the Black Cat—$15, doors open at 8. More from City Paper’s conversation with Nebeker after the jump.

On writing his first song at age 15:

“I really remember it as being such a completely unknown thing that I didn’t know what I was doing until I was doing it, and then there was this song and I was like ‘Oh, I guess I just wrote a song.’ It was some months later before I had the courage to share them with anyone else. Definitely, on some level, why I make music is something to do with a hope of connecting to people… But also there’s some madness in it without reason. There’s something about all of art that’s contrary to reason.”

On his musical influences for 3 Rounds and a Sound:

“I don’t know if I was trying to write like somebody else anymore, I wanted to get out of the Portland music scene. So Ryan and I just went to the coast just to be alone and see what we could create in that setting. But you know, I was listening to pretty much nothing but Joanna Newsom and Neutral Milk Hotel.”

On the origins of “The Story I Heard,” his current favorite song from the album:

“I was putting in some final weeks at a waiting-tables job in Portland before moving out to Astoria for a summer to write the rest of the album. And I was waiting at a bus stop to go to work, and a guy named JoJo came up and started talking to me. He was asking for spare change and I started talking with him. And he was this guy from Jamaica, and he had this something about him that was just almost contagious, so appealing, even though he was obviously in a pretty rough part of his life. I’m generally a pretty shy and reserved person, but he got me to sing Bobby McFerrin songs at the top of my lungs at the Portland bus stop with him. And it just really got me thinking—not that I judge everybody that I see purposely, but it got me thinking about how I see everyone and judge them without really thinking about it. And also thinking about how myself, and how we’re all judged in each other’s eyes.”

With monikers such as The Colonel, Tait Nucleus?, and Smorgasbord!, and a catalog that includes an album called I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being the Master, the Detroit-based sextet Electric Six is often mistaken for a novelty act parodying the aggressive sexuality of disco and arrogant posturing of rock and roll.

But the band’s frontman, Dick Valentine, chafes at the suggestion that the Electric Six are anything short of straight-faced. “Cynical, yes, but not satirical,” says Valentine, whose real name is Tyler Spencer, in a phone interview with Washington City Paper. “Novelty is something that you premeditate, and you’re doing something that you wouldn’t normally do because you want to call attention to yourself or you want to sell more records. And with this band, it’s always been my path of least resistance—it’s just that these songs come naturally… I don’t think we’re trying to make a statement about other types of music in that way.”

On the Electric Six’s new album Kill, out today, the band cuts the usual synth-driven dance rock with some disarmingly sweet monster ballads: “Steal Your Bones,” for instance, is a beautifully composed song that might have cracked the pop charts in the early ’90s. It runs back-to-back with another casually paced ballad called “My Idea of Fun.”

Elsewhere, the band goes after Middle America with “Escape From Ohio,” a takedown of the Buckeye State and its mysterious stranglehold on American culture. “It’s not just a bellwether state in terms of elections,” Spencer says, “but it’s where a lot of products are test-marketed. So if, like, the housewives in Columbus like something, they’ll make more of it for the country.” (The band has tactfully avoided scheduling Ohio dates on its current tour.)

Kill contains some of Electric Six’s most lush, sophisticated songwriting—both musically and lyrically. Spencer is unashamed to say that his music has historically fallen somewhere between “clever and stupid,” but the new record leans toward the former. “I think this is really the only album so far where we want to make sure we play every song at a live show,” Spencer says. Satire might be in the eye of the beholder, but danceability is universal, so Electric Six’s show tomorrow night at the Black Cat should be appealing to everyone—except perhaps housewives from Columbus.

Electric Six performs at 8 p.m. at the Black Cat on Wed., Oct 21. Tickets are $15

Monsters of Folk might seem like an inappropriate moniker for indie darlings Jim James, M. Ward, Conor Oberst, and Oberst collaborator Mike Mogis.

The supergroup kicks off its self-titled debut with a number that might fit more comfortably in the genre of Christian R&B pop: “Sometimes it’s so hard to believe in/But God, I know you have your reasons,” sing James, Ward, and Oberst on “Dear God (sincerely M.O.F.)”

But childlike faith gives way to adolescent rebellion on “Baby Boomer,” teachable strife on “Man Named Truth,” and finally cheerful optimism on “The Sandman, the Brakeman, and Me.”

Throughout, Ward’s steady whisper more or less splits the difference between Oberst’s quavering warble and James’s empyreal crooning—a good blend for three guys with such distinct voices.

The music separates more easily: M. Ward’s fetish for old-timey surf pop rises to the surface on “Whole Lotta Losin’,” while Oberst’s existential, image-dense writing is put front and center on “Temazcal” and “Map of the World,” and James puts on a mellow buzz with “Goodway” and “Magic Marker.”

Lyrically, the album is about becoming OK with the world and yourself. “No split hair’s gonna get me down,” pledges Oberst. “Make way, for whatever will be will be,” advises Ward. “There’s something sweet waiting in the center/Taste and see,” says James, as the others respond in perfect harmony, picking easily at their guitars as Mogis (whose role is mainly track-mixing and strategic Dobro deployment ) pats a benevolent backbeat. The band illustrates this journey toward acceptance in Crayola, and helpfully offers that the trip requires little more than a few joints and a full tank of gas.

For a city populated largely by bureaucrats being slowly strangled by their neckties, Son Volt might be just what the doctor ordered. Frontman Jay Farrar, late of Uncle Tupelo, has made a living celebrating wanderlust and the American landscape with his laconic baritone and increasingly weary-sounding alt.-country tunes. Even if he’s surrendered the punk edge that defined his earlier music, Farrar is still a great songwriter, penning lyrics that are rarely complex but have your average Obama speech beat on romanticizing America and stirring up dormant patriotism. NPR recorded Son Volt when the band played the 9:30 Club in 2005. If you’re chained to your desk, you can listen to that concert here. But if restlessness still has any purchase on your soul, I recommend a sojourn to the 9:30 tonight.

SON VOLT w/ SERA CAHOONE, 9:30 CLUB, TONIGHT, 7 p.m. $20

“I’m having a lot more fun than I thought I would,” said Kings of Leon frontman Caleb Followhill, sweat dripping down his newly trim hair into his stern blue eyes. “I thought you like, wouldn’t be here, or, wouldn’t know who were were, or…”

He said this to a crowd of at least 7,000 bellowing fans Tuesday at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, where the Kings played a two hours of pulsing pop rock, roughly half of which were off their most recent album, Only By the Night. Caleb and his band of tightly jeansed kinfolk might have acted surprised by the high squeal factor of the boiling sea of an audience—which appeared equal parts sleeveless dudes and doe-eyed girls (the one in front of me was wearing a shirt reading “It’s my baby!” and nearly had a conniption fit when the guys played “Knocked Up” during their encore set)—but given the band’s arena-rock turn on its latest record, this is the sort of crowd they should learn to expect.

We missed the first few songs due to car trouble and an overcrowded lot that forced us and the other latecomers into an office park about a quarter mile away, but the song that played our arrival—“Fans”—seemed apropos as we politely elbowed our way into the pavilion. “Fans,” from the third album, Because of the Times, is a model of form following function—a bouyant pop paean that instructs its muses to “rock to the rhythm and bop to the beat of the radio.” Votaries from the band’s earlier, indier years years might have preferred the Kings not embrace the idea of radio pop so openly, but the adoring masses at Merriweather cheered wildly at this and other new-fan favorites such as “Sex on Fire” and “Use Somebody,” the display screens on their digital cameras glowing like moon jellies.

Their stoic stage presence notwithstanding, the Kings went big and they went loud, Caleb hitting the rockstar notes with his simultaneously torn-up and pitch-perfect voice. “This is the most fun I’ve had at a show in a long time,” Caleb said as the set drew toward the end. “That means we’re going to come back real soon.” I swear I felt the cheers resonate in my kidneys. Native sons of the American South and pop idols in the U.K., it appeared by night’s end as though the Kings of Leon had successfully made a fiefdom of Maryland.

Footage from those moon-jelly digicams is all over YouTube, but the ear-caving volume of the show made for a lot of clipping. The below video was taken from far enough away to capture the audio pretty well, if you don’t mind getting seasick. For the full effect, plug your computer into a speaker stack and swallow it.

Pomona professor Kevin D.H. Dettmar has an essay in this week’s Chronicle Review, titled “The Discreet Charm of the Bad Voice,” where he argues that listeners find atonal singing uniquely empathetic because it is easy to imitate. Dettmar’s examples are sometimes dubious—Neil Young, John Mayer, and Thom Yorke aren’t exactly the three tenors, but I would hesitate to call their voices bad by any pop standard—and he devotes a lot of space to name-dropping that might have been better used exploring the sociological underpinnings of the bad-voice appeal. But his basic thesis is worth considering: Are we drawn to certain “bad” singers because their badness makes their music more accessible? To put it in Tocquevillian terms: Is the popularity of imprecise singers like Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits due to the equality of conditions in America, and the democratic tastes it engenders?

It’s an intriguing question, but I think it ultimately misses the point. The difference between Dylan, Cash, Waits, et al. and Joe Karaoke is that those three write extraordinary songs. That is their primary appeal. A shitty song can be popular if a great-sounding vocalist sings it, and a great song can be popular if a shitty-sounding vocalist sings it, but a shitty song by a shitty singer has won’t draw democrats or anyone else. The gap between the musician and the listener must still exist. In the Kurt Vonnegut story “Harrison Bergeron,” set in a dystopia where absolute equality reigns, the characters react with a justified lack of enthusiasm to a ballet performance featuring dancers that are no more or less talented than anyone else who might care to don a leotard. Surely a bad voice alone does not capture the democratic ear; it is merely an ornament of an otherwise moving melody, composition, or narrative. A more honest vehicle for a more honest song. Style following substance.

And so we have David Dondero, the latest of Team Love’s unconventional crooners (Conor Oberst’s label collects them). Dondero’s promo page at Jammin’ Java, where he performs tonight, calls him “this generation’s Townes Van Zandt,” which is almost certainly a stretch—I’d sooner call him “this generation’s other Conor Oberst,” if slightly more troubadour-ish. But NPR calls him the tenth best living songwriter, which is less of a stretch. Incidentally, his songs are very hard to sing along to. (What say you, Dettmar?)

DAVID DONDERO, TONIGHT @ JAMMIN’ JAVA, 8 P.M. $10

The crowd that saw Back Door Slam Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam execute an acrobatic set at the Birchmere last night probably hadn’t seen guitar mastery like that since they were Davy Knowles’s age.

The audience skewed middle-aged—I was probably the youngest person there apart from the 22-year-old Knowles himself—and didn’t fill up the entire hall, which was too bad. But that didn’t stop Davy from turning on the electricity and sending portions of the crowd (one exuberant “young” lady in particular) to fits of hooting and flailing with his vintage blues howl and exceptionally lithe digits.

Opener Rob Drabkin, who flew all the way from Colorado for the occasion, was another technical whiz. He played a brief opening set, crooning over some complex acoustic licks in a style that a little too Dave Matthews for my taste. Then came Davy and BDS, and things got loud. Several thousand sixteenth notes, trills, and string-bends later, the show culminated in a slow jam in which Knowles good-naturedly schooled Maryland guitar-maker Paul Reed Smith, who in turn awarded Knowles a $30,000 guitar.

There is little else that can be said of a performance like last night’s—a fact that both acknowledges its brilliance and betrays its limitations. In a way, watching Knowles and his bandmates (especially Ty Bailie, who matched Knowles solo-for-solo on keys) was like watching Cirque de Soleil: amazing at first, but after an hour or so your senses begin to adjust; and the uncommon feats you witness, while still thoroughly enjoyable, seem increasingly routine. The band’s songs were good, but—apart from a ballad here and a throwback slide piece on a resonator guitar there—more or less of a uniform type and tempo. To put it another way, what made last night’s show great was not the songs themselves, but the way they were played.

If having your first name added to the name of your band is a bellwether for burgeoning celebrity, then you could say 22-year-old Davy Knowles has arrived. A British blues guitarist with a soulful baritone, Knowles has sort of an Stevie Ray Vaughan-meets-Richie Havens thing going on. His band, Back Door Slam Davy Knowles and Back Door Slam, released an album earlier this summer called Coming Up For Air. Produced by Peter Frampton, the record is very much pop with a blues sensibility, rather than the other way around.

In many ways, Knowles & BDS sounds like the younger brother of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals; both jam-ish blues-pop bands with lead singers who have great pipes and love to show them off—the main difference being that Knowles plays guitar, and Potter plays keyboards your heartstrings.

Speaking of Knowles’s weapon-of-choice, the dude flat-out shreds. For guitar nerds, this will be well worth the drive to Alexandria.

DAVY KNOWLES & BACK DOOR SLAM, TONIGHT @ BIRCHMERE, 7:30 P.M. $20

“Hey, there’s an interview goin’ on in here, asshole!” James Felice calls out the door of the Winnebago in the direction of guitar music. His brother Ian is strumming outside with a wild-eyed, fu-manchu’ed man named Searcher, who is singing along in falsetto.

Searcher pokes his head through the passenger’s side window. “Hey, you don’t need to call people ‘asshole,’ douchebag!”

Ian’s nasal voice arrives with the crown of his head at the side door. “I had to get the secret cigarette I keep here.” He produces a cigarette from somewhere.

“There’s only one? Ah, fuck.” says James.

“Yeah, and you don’t get one, you know why?” says Searcher through the front window.

“There’s an interview goin’ on in here!”

These are the Felice Brothers at home. They’ve lived in the beat-up Winnebago for the duration of their summer tour opening for Old Crow Medicine Show—the two brothers, their bassist, their fiddle player, two drummers, and their tour manager. It’s a crowded little cavern, with every surface buried beneath clothes, books, and miscellaneous clutter. There’s a tub full of beer, wine, and ice on the floor inside the door. James has poured us Delirium Nocturnum ale in plastic cups.

“Even though I specifically asked him to get a cigarette for you and I, do you know why you don’t get one now?” says Searcher.

“No, I was calling Ian the asshole,” James explains, grinning.

“Let’s smoke a cigarette, then!”

“I’m doing an interview here!”

“Yeah? Maybe he wants to interview me too.” Searcher has climbed in and is now kneeling backwards on the front passenger’s seat. Ian, meanwhile, has begun smoking the cigarette. “I’m in the band, does he even know who I am?”

I know he’s the drummer, but only because James told me a few minutes earlier. (The third Felice brother, Simone, had been the drummer before he left the band in June to start a new project.) I feel I should speak.

“You’re Searcher.”

“See!” Seacher says triumphantly. “Apparently some people know who I am. Who are you? James Felice? The fuck.”

On stage, the Felice Brothers aren’t much different. They drink, they smoke, they stumble into one another, they laugh and fuck around and improvise. They invite the audience in on the party; then sometimes they’re so preoccupied with their own shenanigans they seem to forget the audience is there. These moments of exclusivity are as seductive the band’s gregariousness. You want to be in on the joke.

In the beginning, the Felice Brothers were just playing for themselves. The sons of non-musical parents in upstate New York, the three oldest boys were a band—playing at their father’s cookouts—long before they had achieved any level of mastery on their instruments. “We were really the only ones listening to us,” says James, who ditched piano for the accordion when the brothers trekked south to busk in Manhattan subway stations. Now he plays both.

One of the more appealing aspects of the Felice Brothers’ music is its intimacy. Dancing and clowning around to their own music, they tend to look like jubilant (read: drunk) members of their own audience who happen to be holding instruments. Now, as they’ve started getting picked up to tour with acts like Conor Oberst and Old Crow, the audience has gotten bigger and farther away.

“The last two weeks, we’ve been playing these huge places with Old Crow and Gil and Dave [Gillian Welch and David Rawlings] and stuff,” he says. “The show changes a little bit, you know? It’s less—like, when you’re playing a little bar with a 150 people, they’re right there, and you can grab beers from them, or yell at them, and they can yell at you, or they come on stage and fuck around with you, and there’s no security or anything so it’s all very free-flowing, and the only reason you’re still playing is because they haven’t come on stage and fuckin’ stopped you yet, you know what I’m saying? So there’s like a push-and-pull with the audience when you’re right down there with ‘em. ‘Cause if they’re not having fun then they don’t fuckin’ care, they’ll leave, or they’ll throw beer at you, or trash the stage, you know? So when you’re playing these big places, and there’s all sorts of security and shit, it’s much more of a show. Much more of a theatrical thing, I guess. So the playing has to be better—you can’t get away with anything anymore, ‘cause not everyone’s drunk.”

“Do you have to drink less before the show?” I ask.

“Eeeee no,” James says, and laughs. “Yeah, kinda, you want to. And it’s more responsibility. Playing in small shows is probably funner. It’s definitely funner. But I think you can express yourself more with the big shows, ‘cause there’s lights and stuff, and the sound is usually like a hundred times better. You get to play rockstar”—he refills my beer, adding, “—kind of, in a weird, sad sort of way.”

He mutters these last few words under a grin. I don’t pursue it, but I think about it later while transcribing my tape of the interview. I can’t decide which he finds weird and sad: the idea that they could play rockstars, or the concept of ‘playing rockstar’ in general. It might have been the former—a token nod to the self-deprecation you’re supposed to exhibit in interviews. But then, the Felice Brothers’ entire act does seem to mock the rockstar pose. It’s messy, unglamorous, unadorned; there’s an overwhelming sense that hey, these are just regular folks. It’s no coincidence that their albums are relentlessly compared to The Basement Tapes—recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in the basement of a house about 20 miles from where the Felice Brothers grew up. One of the most critically acclaimed compilations when it was eventually released, The Basement Tapes were distinctly anti-rockstar: recorded desultorily and, at least originally, for the sole pleasure of the players.

James Felice claims that he and his bandmates have never listened to The Basement Tapes. “I don’t even really feel like it,” he says, chuckling. “First of all, I don’t know why we sound like that, ‘cause I never heard it. But you know I don’t really give a fuck. Who fuckin’ cares, you know, we play the kind of music that we want to play, and if people think it sounds like fuckin’ Bela Fleck, or Beethoven, or fuckin’ mystery jizz, I don’t really give a shit.”

When the Felice Brothers aren’t busy not listening to The Basement Tapes, they often listen to musicians they sound absolutely nothing like: hip-hop artists. This might seem surprising, but it makes more sense than you’d think. “The similarities between country and hip-hop are amazing,” James says. “Coming up in poor places, you sing about the same sort of things, like money, about girls, about guns, about your ride, your mother—the whole gamut’s the same. You know, Jimmie Rogers was, like, the father of modern country, you know, and he’s always singing about his ‘gat’—he used the word ‘gat,’ that’s where it came from!”

Outside of music, the Felice Brothers’ influences, James says, are largely literary. “We read a shitload,” he explains. “If we just wrote about how we live, our songs would be pretty boring. They’d all be about riding around in a Winnebago, or sitting around at home not knowing what to do, or going to a bar, feeling really awkward for an hour, and going home.” A quick survey of the Winnebago turns up a litter of dog-eared paperbacks—The Sun Also Rises, The Portable Nietszche, Tales of Ordinary Madness. “Faulkner, Hemingway, McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon. Russian literature… Just anything we can get our hands on.” One particularly influential muse has been Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, whom James says he has been reading since he was 15. He says he’s glad for McCarthy’s newfound fame, but can’t help but feel protective of what had been, until, recently, his own personal discovery. I begin to understand his frustration about being pegged as a derivative of The Basement Tapes.

“When we started, we didn’t even think about it,” he says. “We played that kind of music because we loved that kind of music—but also all we had was an acoustic guitar. You know, what other kind of music are we going to play?”

As for the next record, James says anything is game—synthesizers, orchestral arrangements, whatever. “It’s going places that are weird and scary, probably. Hopefully. You can’t play the same music your whole life.”