MUSIC

Volta Bureau debuts at the U Street Music Hall tonight alongside Treasure Fingers. The local disco/house ensemble, with members Bernard Farley, Miguel Lacsamana, and Will Eastman, is basically a dance music power trio. Tonight they're just DJing, but check out their original productions on Soundcloud. 9 p.m.; $10.

A bunch of local indie rock guys (William Alberque, Brandon Moses, Alex Tebeleff, and Patrick Kigongo) are hosting a Factory Records Dance Party at LIV. They'll probably spin Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, Happy Mondays, OMD, and ESG; if they're badasses, they'll also spin Abecedarians and Biting Tongues. Doors at 9 p.m.; $5 after; 18+. Free crappy beer between 9 and 10 p.m.

Dame Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons read Shakespeare alongside Maestro Lorin Maazel and the Castleton Orchestra at the Music Center at Strathmore. Surprisingly, as of this writing, a few cheap ($25) tickets and plenty not-so-cheap ($150) tickets remain. 8 p.m.

Pusha T (of Clipse) and Cyhi da Prynce are playing a G.O.O.D Music concert somewhere in D.C. tonight, but the show's sponsor, Heineken, hasn't announced the venue yet. Since a beer company is sponsoring it, the show—wherever it is— is 21+. Cyhi da Prynce goes on at 8:30 p.m.; Pusha T at 9:30 p.m.; and it's hosted by Rob Kardashian's ex-girlfriend Adrienne Bailon. Weird. UPDATE: The show is at Lux Lounge.

Oh yeah, and after you see Swamp Dogg two times, stop by the Soul Train Dance Party (preceded by a probably interesting conversation) at the Folklife Festival's Motor City tent. Tyrone Proctor, an OG Soul Train dancer, will be there, and ?uestlove spins. 6 p.m.; free.

FILM

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers shows at Hirshhorn; in this 1956 sci-fi flick, "alien" is code for "communist," and aliens blow up the Washington Monument. 7 p.m.; free, first come, first serve.

Get lost, pal: A trio of 1960s road shows are on the docket at the Library of Congress tonight: "Then Came Bronson," "Route 66," and "Run For Your Life." 7:30 p.m.; free.

BOOKS

Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter reads from his well-liked debut novel Bright's Passage tonight at Politics & Prose. 7 p.m.; free.

TWEE AS FUCK

Jimmy Valentine's Lonely Hearts Club gets yarn-bombed, and DJ Sharkey provides the soundtrack. 5 p.m.; free.

These United States

For the record: I am not saying this as some scuzzy, shoeless shut-in who ripped What Lasts (out today!) for free. No, I took a break out of my busy day, opened iTunes, and I paid $9.99 for this album. Nor am I saying this as someone who only recently came to country music, or alt-country, or whatever the plaid-shirted 'tards in your yoga class are calling it. I played with cow shit before it was cool for hipsters to walk around smelling like they slept in a dumpster. I got rodeo day—not president’s day—off from school. I have eaten bull testicles, with barbecue sauce and without barbecue sauce.

So believe me when I tell you that good country music should make you move, rev your engine, dance, go out for a grape snow cone/drop her off early, but not go home, etc., and that this album makes me want to take a fucking nap in a house undergoing termite treatment.

Why does These United States do this? I don't know. I've never spoken to Elliott or his mates, and I doubt I will now. This being such a terrible review and all. I have a theory that hipsters demand really boring music; music that they can listen to while they smoke opium or write in their diaries, but I'll spare you the conjecture and just give it to you straight, right after I take a quick nap.

OK. Back.

Let’s dial it down for a minute. There is one really good song on What Lasts. It is called “Water and Wheat” and it sounds exactly like “I Want You to Keep Everything,” which is the best track on TUS’ previous record, Everything Touches Everything. Maybe you think I am going to slam TUS for being derivative? Nope. I don’t even care that “Water and Wheat” has the same rhythm as “I Want You to Keep Everything,” because now that this song is on, I am too busy jumping up and down in my office, pumping my fist in the air, and freaking out on the guy who sits next to me.

“Water and Wheat” is so good, in fact, that I will probably buy a ticket to TUS’ next show, even though I hate live music. (I just accidentally let another song from this album play, one that is not “Water and Wheat,” and now I need another nap.)

This isn’t to say that the entire rest of the album is shit: “Ever Make You Mine” has a decent Doobie Brothers-style breakdown; “Life&Death She&I” features some sweet-sounding steel guitar and Elliott dueting with Dawn Landes (a Kentucky native, occasional vocalist in Hem, and wife of Josh Ritter).

But otherwise? This album is boring as hell. That said, I’ll probably buy the next one, and the one after that—ad infinitum!—in the hopes that Elliott will have figured out what, exactly, lasts.

I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought

These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he'll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”

So far, Pug’s seeking has prompted plenty to seek him in turn—not least, Earle himself. “The way I understand it is, Steve’s manager played Steve my album, and Steve said, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” says Pug. We’re sitting in the green room at The National, in Richmond—I on the slick leather sofa, Joe on the edge of a matching chair adjacent. The furniture looks like it might have been lifted from the set of Scarface, and Pug looks out-of-place in a plaid shirt, faded jeans fraying at the knees, and tan work boots. “It’s cool, a lot of great musicians have come through here,” he says. His tone matches his general comportment: humble, polite—but with supreme confidence lurking just beneath, every so often leaking to the surface like oil from plain earth. He had filled the role of opener that night with consummate deference: playing well, thanking the audience, then helping clear out his gear so the roadies could ready the stage for Earle. I had to wait for him afterward while he hawked his album in the lobby, stuffing a fistful of rumpled bills into his jeans. He’s not a star yet. But when he says plenty of great musicians have come through here, he’s certainly not apologizing for his own presence.

“Bob Dylan is someone I’ve been compared to a lot,” he says when I ask him about his influences, surprising me with his lack of shyness about this fact. (These comparisons are not for nothing: You can hear echoes of Dylan’s sneer, his indulgent harmonica breaks, and his poet-advocate m.o. in Pug’s music. But to liken someone to Dylan implies far more than musical similarities—and musicians, who are generally more sensitive to this fact than their fans, tend to distance themselves from such comparisons.) Pug also counts among his influences John Hiatt, Warren Zeavon, and Beck—“songwriters that don’t really adhere to a genre, they just write songs that connect to people.” But ultimately comparisons will not do, not even flattering ones. “You hear an athlete say they want to get to a point where they’re only competing against themselves,” he says. “As a musician, you want people to compare your music not to other musicians, but to the rest of your catalog.”

Pug’s catalog is currently only seven songs long. He recorded his debut EP, Nation of Heat, for free at a Chicago studio courtesy of a friend who worked there, and put out the album himself last summer. You can’t find it in stores, only on the Internet and at shows. “Your industry and mine are both changing,” Pug says to me, taking a drag in the smoking pen outside the National. That’s for sure. Here’s a guy who recorded seven songs and put them on the Internet, bypassing “the industry” altogether, and now he’s touring with Steve Earle and Josh Ritter. He’s been sought by plenty of labels, but has seen no compelling reason to sign. “I’m making a very good living just doing what I’m doing now,” Pug says, “and I have complete control over what I make.” He says there might come a time in his life where he’ll seek the stability of a label, but he’s in no hurry. “I really want one that’s into what I do,” he says, “not one who wants me to write choruses.”

Yes, it’s a different world: different than the world Dylan and the others played in—different than the world they described, and different than the one that rewarded them with fame. It’s easy to read the lyrics of Pug’s “I Do My Father’s Drugs” to mean that folk’s battle has been fought and won.

When hunger strikes are fashion, and freedom is routine
And all the streets in Cleveland are named for Martin Luther King
You will see me at the protest, but you’ll notice that I drag
I burn my father’s flag

But when I wonder aloud whether a ‘60s-style folk musician can thrive in the 21st century, Pug’s rebuke is polite but firm: “I think it’s sort of a misconception to call it ’60s-style folk,” he says. Pug describes folk not as an era-specific phenomenon but as continuum—one that manifested in Irish troubadours, then southern bluesmen, then the ‘60s discontents. What I take Pug to mean is that the tradition did not end; it still exists wherever there is restlessness and doubt and disillusionment and people who would use music to confront these things rather than to escape them.

In any case, it is far too early in the development of Pug’s music to know how popular it will be. He says he recorded his LP (scheduled for a fall release) with a backing band, meaning the album that will serve as most people’s introduction to Joe Pug might sound much different than Nation of Heat.

Pug’s set in Richmond included two new songs from that album, “Bury Me Far From My Uniform” and “Not So Sure.” You can check them out below, courtesy of Laundromatinee.com: