Modern folk rarely includes storytelling. Todd Snider is, therefore, an anachronism: a true bard who spends at least as much time contextualizing songs as he does playing them.

Originally from Oregon, Snider has accumulated barrels of yarns over 15-plus years on the road — such as becoming the unlikely frontman of a Memphis country band after the lead singer was knocked unconscious by a drunk patron falling off a ceiling swing (to take one example from Snider’s most recent live album, which came out in February).

In keeping with the form, championed in America by activists like Guthrie, Seeger, Dylan, Ochs, et al., there’s political fare too: notably the song “Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight White American Male.” But while Snider may be old school, he is no revolutionary. “I might share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening,” he is wont to disclaim at the outset of shows, “not because I think they’re smart, or because I think you need to know them, but because they rhyme. I didn’t come down here to change any of y’alls minds about anything, I come down here to ease my own mind about everything.”

Apropos, much of Snider’s work celebrates people and places that, like him, “don’t wanna throw [their] fishing line in the old mainstream.” On “Sideshow Blues” (a near clone of Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”), Snider sings: “It’s a circus out here, Mama, I got them sideshow blues.” One reading: I may be a freak, but the rest of the world is an absurd pageant too, just with a bigger budget and more pyrotechnics.

The sideshow is the main event at The Birchmere tonight. Tickets still available.

TODD SNIDER w/ MARSHALL CHAPMAN, THE BIRCHMERE (Map), TONIGHT, 7:30 P.M., $25

How do you make the perfect pipe bomb?

Cash from strangers, and a little help from your friends. That’s how Phillips Saylor has gone about it, anyway.

When Saylor, frontman of the local alt-country band Stripmall Ballads, decided to mix his music with puppet theater, he tapped acquaintances at the Puppet Underground and friends and volunteers from around the D.C. arts scene to help give dimension to characters he’d been singing about for years. For funding, Saylor turned to a nifty social networking/patronage site called Kickstarter. (“Disprove my point that Americans don’t think artists are valuable members of society,” Saylor said in a video-recorded plea for donations. “I hope that I can walk around proudly and say this country, this coast, this city, gives a damn about the arts and gives a damn about independent artists and values new, freaky shit.” The post drew $840 from 18 donors, almost twice the original goal.)

The product—a folk opera called The Perfect Pipe Bomb—will be unveiled tonight at the Strathmore Mansion, in Bethesda. It chronicles the journey of a pair of fringe-living lovers, named Jane and John, who bond over dope and careless love and soon find themselves on a quest for St. Louis, an unlikely El Dorado that promises more of both.

It’s a tale that smacks of the sort of shadow Americana—members of a disaffected underclass dodging through the machinery of capitalism in search of their own American dream—that appeals to Saylor. Years ago, when he was working for a Christmas tree lot as a sandwich board-wearing Santa Claus, Saylor says he spent a lot of time talking and sneaking smoke breaks with the panhandlers on Maryland 355. “I just got to know them, and they were all deep down interesting people—in a way more interesting than normal civilians,” he says. The homeless narrator in The Perfect Pipe Bomb (played by Joe P. of local band The Nice Tries) hails from that stretch of Rockville Pike.

“You always gotta just kind of write what you know; write about your own experiences and who you’ve known and the lives that you’ve lived,” said Saylor, who turns 32 next week. “And I’ve spent a lot of time transient, spent time living on the street. I’ve spent time touring for like five years, living out of an ambulance. I’ve spent a lot of time with the transient class.”

We were sitting on the front porch at a house in Petworth where Saylor has been building his own invisible republic out of cardboard and cloth. They had been in the basement when I arrived: Saylor; Eli Cohn, who plays bass in Stripmall Ballads; and Ximena Guerrero, a puppeteer with the D.C.-based Puppet Underground. Saylor showed me some of the shadow puppets they’d been working on, including a tiny cutout of Jane attached by a line of fabric to a large hot air balloon—part of a dream sequence in which Jane finds herself tethered to a wayward dirigible.

“We’ve got a 3-D balloon with a basket and a little guy, and we’re going to float that throughout the audience,” Saylor told me. “Then it’s going to go behind the shadow screen, and the rest of the drama will take place in shadow.”

This is the first time Saylor has tried staging something of this scale, or directed puppets. But he says he’s not worried. “I’ve had quite a bit of confidence throughout this whole ordeal, really for no reason,” he says. The protagonist of Saylor’s opera shares her creator's ambitiousness; Jane thinks that with a precise enough design, she can build the perfect pipe bomb: one that will make a big bang without blowing up in anyone’s face. It is, alas, a pipe dream.

Will Saylor’s concoction prove more wieldy? He thinks so. But the only way you’ll know is if you make the trip and find out for yourself.

WHAT: STRIPMALL BALLADS PRESENTS: THE PERFECT PIPE BOMB
WHERE: STRATHMORE MANSION, BETHESDA (RED LINE)
WHEN: TONIGHT @8:00 P.M.
TICKETS: $10 ONLINE, $12 DOOR

The

To read Steve Kolowich's review, go here.

It's been five years since Medications released its first album, Your Favorite People All in One Place, and with a revamped line-up and more sophisticated vocals, the band's second release, Completely Removed, proves its hiatus was quite productive. The D.C.-based post-punk trio's newest album ups the ante, taking the band in a direction that shiess away from prog- rock and finds the edge between pop and punk. With ballads like "Brasil '07," Medications has released one of the District punk world's best records in a long time.

To read Brent Burton's review, go here.

Details after the jump:

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

Can you have too many portable pump organs?

For Ben Knox Miller and the Providence-based roots band The Low Anthem, the answer is no. “We use Craigslist,” Miller says. “Every time we go on tour, and we’re going to a city and maybe have a day off, we check to see if they have any portable pump organs. That’s the instrument that we’re most obsessed with.”

Miller and his bandmates are audiophiles of an antiquarian stripe. They profess a deep respect for old music, and say their own music is indebted to ghosts of Americana such as Mississippi John Hurt, Woody Guthrie, and Gram Parsons, as well as living legends like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and The Beach Boys. But The Low Anthem doesn’t just prefer old musicians; they prefer old instruments. Last time they came through town, they were toting 25 instruments in their van, outnumbering the band members 6 to 1.

The Low Anthem, whose three founding members met at Brown University, are not so much songwriters as chemists. “You’re playing a song, and you start to hear certain timbres that you want to accompany it, and then you look for whatever instrument can make that timbre,” says Miller. “That’s how we came on to these odd instruments, it wasn’t because we found an odd instrument and said ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we used this?’ It was because we heard this mellow horn sound, and we thought was a French horn but it wasn’t quite a French horn, then we thought maybe it was a fugal horn and it wasn’t quite a fugal horn, and then when we found the flat horn it was the flat horn all along.”

The sound that has emerged from this methodology is somewhat schizophrenic. The first track of its breakout album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, is a sparse, dreamlike song cooed in falsetto. Elsewhere on the album, the songs stomp and Miller barks a convincing Tom Waits impression.

But eclecticism seems to be working for The Low Anthem. Britain's Uncut magazine named Oh My God, Charlie Darwin one of last year’s top albums. The band’s stock is rising here at home, too. Case in point: last November, the band was opening at the Black Cat; tomorrow, they’re headlining a show at the 9:30 Club. Also, they’re playing a free show at the Kennedy Center earlier in the day. Tickets for both are still available.

THE LOW ANTHEM, THE KENNEDY CENTER’S MILLENIUM STAGE, THURSDAY, 6 P.M., FREE… and THE LOW ANTHEM W/ VANDAVEER, 9:30 CLUB, THURSDAY, 9 P.M., $15

After the jump: More excerpts from an interview I did with Miller and bandmate Jeff Prystowsky last time they were in D.C., in November.

On the current album:

Miller: “We came up with the album title, ‘Oh My God, Charlie Darwin,’ before all the songs. We thought it was very funny. We were wandering around the zoo, and thinking about all the different animals, and we thought, Wouldn’t that be funny if we put it out?’—It’d probably get banned in Kansas public schools and launch us into counterculture stardom. It didn’t work out that way. It’s too pretty. There are a couple church choirs that are actually singing ‘Charlie Darwin’… But after we came up with that record title, different themes, different songs, everything started to zero in a little bit, and we realized there was a lot of obsession with survival of the fittest, and the death of the week, and the contingency of all of our values on Right morality. We’re very interested in the idea of how Christian values have survived and battled against other political values and religious values—and interested in looking at the church as this organism, with its reproductive arm of the missionaries going out and spreading its seed… We all read East of Eden while we were making it. Which didn’t have anything to do directly with what the record was about, but it kind of put us in the same story and the same headspace.”

On the upcoming album:

Miller: “We’ve had all these songs for such a long time now. The last record we started on New Year’s Day 2008. So that’s coming on two years now, and the songs were even older than that. So it’s basically been three years of songwriting that’s been repressed—we haven’t been able to put something out ’cause we’ve kept getting offered tours and have this can’t-say-no problem… Yeah, there will be some different things about it. There are certain parts of it that play with different kinds of humor that were absent from the last record, which was pretty weighty… When Jeff writes in his natural state—he’s been writing a lot of songs—he writes these hilarious, simple country songs. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to bring them into the fold with the other songs, ’cause you just laugh. We’re starting to figure it out… You’re worried that it’s going to undermine the other stuff you want to do, to just throw disparate things together. But we think we’re on to a way to do it.

On their propensity for hoarding antique instruments:

Miller: “It’s easier to talk about it in the negative—like, talk about how bad a new casio keyboard sounds and say, well, of course use the pump organ. Or to listen to a new pop production that’s done with auto-synchronization. We don’t use click tracks or anything, we just try to let the music breathe and be natural.”

Prystowsky: “Like, the upright bass, sometimes there’s a slap that happens when you hit the strings, and people are like ‘Oh no, it should be completely clean.’ We don’t mind little scrapes and scratches and things that happen naturally when you’re trying to emote something. That feels more honest and real to us.”

Miller: “If it’s survived that long, then it must be good.”

The Hurt Locker, Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christopher Waltz, Mo’Nique.

There, I just freed up your Sunday night. Wanna go see some excellent music instead?

Actually, if Bridges gets any Oscar love, it bodes well for the status of the guitar-toting troubadour in America’s cultural mythology—and, perhaps, for the prospects of Joe Pug and Justin Townes Earle. Both are country-folk musicians in their twenties, but you won't see either singing duets with Taylor Swift at the Verizon Center anytime soon. Each is decidedly old-fashioned: Earle with his Texas-country pedigree, throwback formality, and affection for honky tonk; and Pug with his sparse arrangements, linear songwriting, and lonely-guy-with-a-guitar aesthetic.

Both put on a good show. Earle is a ham who can set you to dancing with nothing but a tightly syncopated picking pattern. Pug, who toured last summer with Earle’s famous dad, just put out what I described the other week as an anticlimactic debut LP, but his lyrics will still sock you in the gut.

More so than Kathryn Bigelow’s acceptance speech. I promise.

JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE W/ JOE PUG, BIRCHMERE (Map), MARCH 7, 7:30 P.M., $22.50

Photo courtesy of Flickr user mjbialis.

People who hear Dawes before learning anything about the band are generally surprised to learn they’re from Los Angeles. What, like L.A. never had cowboys?

The band’s m.o. is most certainly country, what with its easy stride and affinity for one-four-five “Hey brother, jump on that third when we hit the chorus” template. But there’s definitely some serious suburbanism here—not in a “I’m going to revolt against my parents’ decision to furnish our house out of a SkyMall catalog by wearing army boots and starting a screamo band called ‘Fuckstick’” kind of a way; but more in a “I’m a restless, romantic kid who’s colored my Wonderbread life literary with the help of an old record collection and a wholesome sense of irony” sort of way. See Exhibit A: the song “Love Is All I Am,” with accompanying Wonder Years-style music video. See also Exhibit B: Dawes covering the song from the Wonder Years.

The verdict? Dawes is a cocky young alt-country outfit with an autobiographical bent and plenty left to prove. They put on a great show a few months ago opening for Langhorne Slim at the Rock and Roll Hotel, highlighted by the soulful anthem “When My Times Comes.” Tonight they’ve got the headlining slot at the IOTA Club and Café in Arlington, with Jason Boesel and Cory Chisel and the Wandering Sons supporting. Word from the venue is they’re expecting a sellout, but IOTA doesn’t reserve tickets and the door is first come, first serve.

DAWES w/ JASON BOESEL and CORY CHISEL & THE WANDERING SONS, IOTA CLUB AND CAFÉ (21+), ARLINGTON (near Clarendon Metro), 8:30 P.M. $12.

Though Citay began as a studio-only project between musicians Ezra Feinberg and Tim Green, the group now employs a bevy of rotating musicians that add a sense of spontaneity to the record.

To read more about Citay's "minimalist indie-rock space-outs using the tools of classic folk-rock," check out the full review here.

It was a good year to be young and bearded. A good decade, really. The aughts kicked off with the release of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whose soundtrack opened the eyes of at least one generation to the pleasures of underproduced plucking and simple melodies; and ended with three harbingers of the so-called "indie folk" genre joining hands beneath the unqualified Monsters of Folk moniker, using half-century-old gear to produce a beautiful mess of surf pop, spaghetti westerns, and ethereal lullabies. Confusing!

Anyway, whatever folk is, there was plenty made in 2009 that is worth a listen. Here's my top five, in alphabetical order:

The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You

With the addition of Rick Rubin at the switches and a lot of piano, these North Carolina sibs evolved from a twangy string band to what Ben Folds might have sounded like if he grew up listening to Gram Parsons instead of Elton John. This record might be corny if it weren’t so canny.

Best Tracks: “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise”; “Ten Thousand Words”

2. Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound

With Justin Vernon’s sojourn into the wilds of Wisconsin still fresh in the minds of flannel-clad twentysomethings and NPR music critics, you might say Blind Pilot’s Israel Nebeker was under some pressure when he dusted off the dog-eared script of self-exile and absconded to an abandoned cannery to pen the songs that would become 3 Rounds and a Sound. The record isn’t as intense as Vernon’s lauded 2008 opus, but it’s small, intimate, and sneakily spellbinding.

Best Tracks: “One Red Thread”; “3 Rounds and a Sound”

(Update: It has occurred to me that 3 Rounds and a Sound was actually released in 2008, and was included here due to the author's cultural jetlag. The plug stays because the album is awesome... but for the purposes of maintaining a full list, I am obliged to give its spot to Townes, Steve Earle's album of Townes Van Zandt covers. Best tracks: "Lungs"; "To Live is to Fly")

3. The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love

To listen to the Decemberists' fantastical folk-rock opera is to observe frontman Colin Meloy in his element: Maidens on horseback and lustful shapeshifters; envious forest queens, murderous drifters; dark magic, tragedy, verbose writing—these are a few of his favorite things.

Best Tracks: “The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)”; “The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)”; “The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)”; “The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)”

4. The Felice Brothers, Yonder is the Clock

The Felice Brothers’ first release as members of the Team Love label was slightly more subdued than its self-titled 2009 album, but this posse of backwater yankees still brings the firewater rain on a few tracks. As for the slower stuff, is there any tool more tastefully emo than a well-deployed cello? Yes: a well-deployed accordion.

Best Tracks: “Penn Station”; “Ambulance Man”

5. Monsters of Folk, Monsters of Folk

I sure hoped indie darlings Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Jim James (Yim Yames?) wouldn’t disappoint with their long-anticipated collaboration. They sure didn’t.

Best Tracks: “Whole Lotta Losin’”; “Temazcal”; “The Sandman, the Brakeman, and Me”

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.