Late but essential! Good stuff going on tonight.

In 2011, you can find a lot of terrible music at the intersection of indie rock, detached hip-hop patois, and gleeful art-noise. EMA, aka Erika M. Anderson of the defunct noise-folk band Gowns, inhabits a similar headspace, but few recent albums sound as vital as her Past Life Martyred Saints. Maybe that’s because it’s stylish but not posed, and often downright unhinged. “Fuck California, you made me boring,” she spits at the top of her best song, “California,” hovering above a smear of synthy feedback and trebly thunderclaps. Some songs are compositionally adventurous: “The Grey Ship,” a seven-minute suite, builds from hissy folk crawl to snaky spiritual to prog-rock maelstrom and back. The words, meanwhile, balance violent and religious imagery with disarming, straightforward turns. “When you showed up at the top,” EMA sings in a pretty wisp toward the end of “Marked,” “I almost threw up on the spot.” The overriding aesthetic is controlled chaos—abrasive, broken-keyboard art pop and confessional, just-tempered lyrics crammed into a pliable form. If it was scarier, it’d border on witch house. Any tighter and more melodic, and it’d be scrunk. EMA performs with CSS and MEN at 7 p.m. at 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $25. (202) 265-0930.

MUSIC

Best option for eccentric twang is Black Cat, which has Blitzen Trapper and Dawes. 8 p.m. Sold out.

There's a free Red Bull-sponsored rap battle tonight at the Fillmore—RSVP here—featuring unknown MCs, but count on the judges (Big K.R.I.T., Joe Budden, and Devin the Dude) performing, too. 7 p.m.

BOOKS

The Jewish Literary Festival started yesterday, but it's offerings are secular and impressive: Tonight's event is "United by Faith, Divided by War: Jews and the Civil War." 7:30 p.m. at the D.C. JCC. $25. Also on the Civil War tip: Tony Horwitz is at P&P discussing his book about abolitionist John Brown.

DANCE

Influential choreographer Bill T. Jones discusses his career at Clarice Smith. Free. 5:30 p.m.

Details after the jump:

THE BUILDERS AND THE BUTCHERS w/ RX BANDITS and ZECHS MARQUISE @ ROCK & ROLL HOTEL (Map), Doors: 7 p.m., $15

Oregon folk-rock posse Blitzen Trapper this week released a music video for the song "Black River Killer," off the band's 2008 record Furr. The song is a sociopath's anthem; the diary of a murderer who keeps getting released by the state then consistently kills the first person he encounters. The video, directed by newcomer Daniel Elkayam, depicts the faceless recidivist's travels from victim to victim and jailhouse to jailhouse in a series of scenes sewn together as a single, swooping tracking shot.

(Video embedded after jump.)

Elkayam's video seems to draw heavily from the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, which emphasizes the song's thematic similarities with the Oscar-winning film (and book). The the song's chorus, "Oh when, oh when / Will the spirit come a-callin' for my soul to send? / Oh when, oh when / Will the keys to the kingdom be mine again?" evokes not Anton Chigurh, No Country's wayward mercenary, but Sheriff Tom Bell (played in the film by Tommy Lee Jones), who in the penultimate scene tells his invalid brother, "I always thought as I got older, God would just sort of come into my life somehow. And he didn't."

Bell's struggle to maintain his faith against the inexorable cruelty of the world is the film's central tragedy; in the song, this tragedy unfolds within the Black River Killer himself. "I've been wandering in the dark about as long as sin / But they say it's never too late to start again." The songs puts this optimism on trial. By its end, the Killer comes to the same conclusion as Bell, replacing that hopeful axiom with a much bleaker one: No man can expel darkness from the world, or himself–and neither can God.

In the music video, "Black River Killer" seems less a tale of a troubled ne'er-do-well and more a criticism of the criminal justice system. The civil authorities–particularly the sheriff–seem at once outraged by the Killer's behavior and eager to give him yet another change to go straight. Elkayam gives the lyric "It's never too late to start again" to the sheriff (played by Jeff Gorham), whose evangelical bluster only reinforces the phrase's naive reductionism. To wit, the next scene shows the sheriff dead with a knife in his back while the Black River Killer breezes off to Oregon in search of his next victim.

Eric Earley of Blitzen Trapper

Around 11:45 p.m. last night, I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth—the horse being, in this case, Marty Marquis of Blitzen Trapper: the crowd of fans who braved last night’s ice-capped sidewalks to see BT and Alela Diane perform at the Black Cat was…"yeah, pretty stiff."

Lounging by the soundboard after his band’s sold-out show, Marquis offered this answer to my question about the notably somber mood that prevailed throughout Blitzen Trapper’s no-nonsense, efficiently satisfying set. Marquis and his four bandmates, as well as opener Alela Diane, hail from the Pacific Northwest—Portland, to be precise—and the entire show reflected a sense of longing for a forsaken yet much wished-for home. At times, lead vocalist Eric Earley and his four fellow “Trappers” seemed to have been struggling to overcome a resistance to the crowd’s adulation—as if becoming popular and remaining authentic were mutually exclusive projects.

Critical consensus lauds the band for its ability to walk the line between earthy, old-timey folk themes and cutting-edge variations in rhythm and instrumentation. An introductory run-through of the band’s most recent album, Furr (2008), yields thirteen tightly produced songs, only one of which—the eponymous first single—exceeds four minutes in length. Although BT has moved away from the bold experimentation that characterized Wild Mountain Nation (2007), Furr’s atmosphere ranges from Tom Waits-style twang, on such songs as “Stolen Shoes and a Rifle” and “Black River Killer,” to the glam-rock audacity of “Love U.”

The history behind Blitzen Trapper’s wildly successful “spring tour” with fellow Oregonian Alela Diane is pretty standard: promising band self-produces a handful of albums (in BT’s case, three), gets picked up by a prominent indie label (Subpop), collects positive—if pompous—reviews from iconic music sources (Pitchfork doled out comparisons to Bob Dylan and Neil Young), and sells out venues across the country. With the giddiness of young children, Blitzen Trapper posts comments under the “Tour” section of its website—the listing for their February 19th show at Chicago’s Empty Bottle reads: “TWO SHOWS! 10pm and 7pm, both SOLD OUT. Holy crap! Thank you Chicago!”

Considering the frenzy of excitement currently circulating around this tour, the band’s austere performance was somewhat perplexing. Earley, the only band member to have foregone facial hair for this particular performance, hardly cracked a smile—except when prefacing his grandma’s favorite song, a folk ditty from the twenties about cocaine. Altogether, Earley plays as though he might be paying a price for something, or giving the audience members what they want out of some sense of reluctant altruism. This does, though, make for a good rock show. For all the kudos that the band receives for its willingness to blur genre lines, Blitzen Trapper plays most poignantly when focused on extremes: either the spare, plucky harmonization of a song like “Lady on the Water,” or the all-out rock degeneration of the show’s finale, which Earley titled “The Gold for Bread Suite.” The Trappers, evidently, are Renaissance men when it comes to instrumentation; Michael Van Pelt, on bass, added a plastic bird whistle to his ensemble to use during “Furr.”

If Earley and his boys had trouble accepting their audience’s thirst for a bit of throw-back country comfort, Alela Diane and her four backup musicians (one of whom happened to be her father) provided, as one fan professed to me, “power and inspiration.” From the moment that the Black Cat’s tightly packed crowd laid eyes on Diane and her gang of long haired, vintage-styled troubadours, a sensation of bi-coastal intimacy emerged, thanks not only to Diane’s remarkably soothing voice, but more so to the wonderfully casual, socially intimate manner in which her band invites the audience into its world.

Sticking mostly to songs off her new album To Be Still, Diane mesmerized the crowd to a degree that became almost uncomfortable. For a female singer-songwriter these days, the waters of indie rock celebrity are difficult to navigate, given the apparent similarities between many of the genre’s forerunners. Diane’s unpretentious manner—most endearingly, the way she giggles while triple-fisting bottled water, red wine and coffee in between songs—seems fragile, especially given the comparisons with Cat Power, Sandy Denny, and Joanna Newsom already abound. Call it a pleasant surprise, call it heroine worship—either way, the crowd received Diane gratefully. As a front-row fan explained to me during her set, “She fills me up. We are blessed to have her here. I am happy—are you happy?”