What’s more American than air guitar?

Nothing, apparently. On entering the 9:30 Club on Friday, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the venue was hosting the U.S. Air Guitar Championship or a political convention. Bunting hung from the balcony, “God Bless America” and other patriotic standards blasted from the PA, and a cache of red-white-and-blue balloons cascaded from the rafters as the event began.

It was an election, of sorts. Some of the competitors even had delegations–most noticeably Sanjar the Destroyer, whose supporters wore white-and-black tees reading “STD: Sexually Transmitted Destruction”; and hometown favorite The Shred (i.e. Lance Kasten), the 47-year-old construction worker whose ankle-breaking plunge from atop an amp stack at last year’s finals aptly summed up the straight-faced absurdity of this new American pastime.

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Two things about Son Volt’s new album, American Central Dust, to start: First, there’s little here Son Volt hasn’t shown us before. Second, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.

The record finds Jay Farrar back on the road, searching for meaning beneath America’s fingernails. He gives us grainy portraits of Rust-Belt Americans, portrayed with such reverence that one might imagine Farrar as a candidate for elective office were his paeans not so genuine (and irreligious). And Son Volt, which rose (like Uncle Tupelo before it) from the dust of troubadours, describes the land in the same terms as its forebears, and often from the same perspective: the seat of a moving vehicle, with America whizzing past the window.

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I got some flack from a friend the other week when I all but anointed local boy Joe Pug the savior of folk music. His counterargument—aside from my insinuation being broad to the point of inanity—was a Swedish rambler by the name of Kristian Matsson, otherwise known as The Tallest Man on Earth. Matsson opened for John Vanderslice Tuesday night at The Black Cat.

Vanderslice is a talented musician who, with the help of other talented musicians, performed a repertoire rich with rollicking, smartly arranged pop-rock songs. Between songs he kept it light and affable, complimenting a blueberry pie an audience member had baked for the band and asking to check out some guy in the front row’s camera. But there was no upstaging Matsson, whose stage presence combined the quirk of a street mime with the brimstone of a tent revivalist to create something weird and very moving.

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