The Museum played before acts like Carolina Chocolate Drops (gospel hoe-downs, approximately), Wanda Jackson, and Amos Lee, and a day after Gillian Welch, Earl Scruggs, and the Decemberists, whose presence explains why Newport sold out this weekend for the first time in its 52-year history. Wax's band, including a smart three-piece horn section and a Mexican son jarocho dancer, displayed its usual panache, and made a strong argument for why the festival should still exist.

Newport has something of a dual personality these days, exemplified in the divide between the "dancing section" (yes, there is actually a dancing section) and the lawn-chair section. Concomitantly, we had the nostalgia acts and the Bob Boilen-approved youngbloods; this is an oversimplification, but not as drastic a one as you might think. Heavyweights such as the Decemberists are called in to round out the crowd, but meanwhile the relevance of the proceedings (if we still worry about these things) is, I think, a healthy question.

Folk music as a rule toes the line between calling out the bullshit pieties and preserving the needful ones. Most traces of purism are gone from Newport. After a heavily distorted "Legionnaire's Lament," Colin Meloy could safely joke: "Pete did not brandish an axe for that one." (Seeger was not only present but within axe-swinging distance; for a gloss of Meloy's reference, see here.) That's a good thing: Mavis Staples kills when she has an electric band behind her, and Wanda Jackson offers a warm and witty rockabilly set—though Newport's Gospel deficit remains troubling. Still, we're talking about a festival that came of age fighting the Man (see: "This machine kills fascists"); it's hard to maintain that attitude when you're suddenly onstage at the pleasure of the Man's Prius-driving brother.

The best answer I think is when a festival—however hoary, however sponsored—makes possible the national debut of otherwise marginal or regional acts. On my ballot, this year's emergent big-timers included several fantastic female harmony groups such as The Secret Sisters and Mountain Man, a trio that combines three-part barbershop with more intricate, canticle-like arrangements to glorious effect. It would be delightful to see both groups return next year. David Wax has proven that success at the festival does not go unrewarded, though residents of Mount Pleasant may well mourn to find that he isn't knocking on their doors as often as he used to.

Photograph of David Wax at Newport by Annie Galvin

You loved them together in Anchorman and, uh, Bewitched; now Will Ferrell and Steve Carell will share the screen again in The Office.

Morning, all. Hope you navigated your way through last night's snow okay. I'm sure some of you have the day off as a result. Whether you're off or whether you're working, hope your day's a good one.

TBD's Sarah Godfrey reports that DC9 will begin hosting concerts again in March. The club announced on Twitter that Murs will perform March 15 and the Gay Blades on March 23. The concerts will mark the club's first since the Oct. 15 death of Ali Ahmed Muhammed outside the club.

Bummed about Steve Carell's impending departure from The Office? Maybe the news of Will Ferrell's arrival, however temporary, to the show will cheer your heart. The Saturday Night Live alum will join the sitcom for a several-episode arc this season. He'll play a branch manager who, according to the NBC press release, "proves to be just as inappropriate” as Carell's Michael Scott. Are we surprised?

I know you all read and loved Kriston Capps' cover story on Pink Line Project's Phillipa Hughes last fall. Remember how a a guy attempted to snatch her purse last fall? Well, its seems he's been incarcerated since then, and he had time to reflect on his actions while in jail. Hughes received an apology letter from him, via the prosecutor's office. She considering writing back. I gotta say, his handwriting is better than mine.

Like the Phillipa cover, I'm sure you also read Steve Kolowich's review two weeks ago of The Decemberists' new album, The King Is Dead. He calls it "musically bright and very listenable." Apparently about 93,567 listeners agreed–enough to give the band its first number one album on the Billboard chart. The most units one of the band's albums sold in its first week out? A mere 19,000, with 2009's The Hazards of Love.

Details after the jump:

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

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”

Here's what you need to know about The Decemberists playing The Hazards of Love in its entirety on their current tour: on prog-rock bulletin boards, folks are comparing this show to Genesis performing The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in the 1970s.

Hazards of Love sounds awfully proggy on record, and live it's got all the telltale signs: a theatrical presentation (including costumes of sorts), a ridiculously fantastical concept/storyline, lots of Hammond organ and other keys, a gratuitously long children's choir section... everything to make the latent prog fan inside you start drooling. And the thing is, it works. Before last night I wasn't quite sure what to make of the album, but its highlights are exhilirating in the live setting, especially those featuring the powerhouse vocals of My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. Set the absurd concept aside and the music stands on its own remarkably well.

More photos and thoughts after the jump. Full gallery here.

Colin Meloy and company were on last night, blazing through the Hazards of Love material and then playing a short second set that drew at least one song from each of the band's full-length albums, plus a couple surprises (including a cover of Heart's "Crazy On You" that was basically an excuse for the band's two guest female vocalists to wail). The selection tended to the mellow—for instance "Red Right Ankle," "Engine Driver," and the gorgeous, moving encore of "Sons and Daughters." For this last, Meloy mentioned that the band had made a side trip to tour the White House, and in the spirit of what they felt during that visit, he had the audience join him for the song's ecstatic refrain, "Hear all the bombs fade away." It was probably the only song more perfect for an encore closer than "The Mariner's Revenge Song."

I saw the Decemberists' show in Richmond last Friday as well, and came away from that one less than satisfied – the band fucked around too much, making jokes to the point that it killed the flow of the concert and hurt the actual performances of the songs. At Merriweather, thanks to a strict time limit on their set, the band were forced to tighten things up a bit, which had a hugely positive effect on their show. After all, prog-rock might revel in its excess, but it's always best with at least a hint of moderation.

Robyn Hitchcock and Andrew Bird opened. Merriweather isn't the easiest place to get to from D.C., so I missed Hitchcock's set, but Bird's performance was predictably great and photos of it are included in the full gallery. A teaser:

The Decemberists’ new folk-rock opera, The Hazards of Love, traces a well-worn arc: Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl to spawnicidal rake, rake is besieged by ghosts of his murdered children, boy gets girl back, boy and girl drown in turbulent metaphorical river.

Like we’ve never heard that one before.

For the eccentric Portland quintet, an opera was an inevitable turn, since it's the ideal vehicle for songwriter Colin Meloy’s elaborate lyrical constructions. Meloy—a bookish esotericist who tends to dress the part of a door-to-door Bible salesman—has exhibited a knack for narrative songwriting throughout the Decemberists’ career, from the quirky character sketches in Her Majesty the Decemberists and Picaresque to the suites of the band’s last album, The Crane Wife. While The Decemberists’ first attempt at this sort of project—an 18-minute EP called The Tain—was a mediocre effort, the their musical style fits the form. In the context of an album-length song cycle, Meloy’s language, which tends toward the obscure and archaic, sounds less stilted.

The Hazards of Love places us in a medieval mythscape where corncrakes crow in lieu of roosters, disapproving sisters dis each other’s beaus as “irascible blackguards,” and it's not unusual for maidens a-wandering in the taiga to be impregnated by shapeshifting forest-children. So it is with Margaret, the album’s embattled heroine, who finds her own belly big with child courtesy of a sympathetic he-nymph named William. Overtaken by idealistic love, the two embark on a doomed romance beset by a jealous mother and a wanton rapist.

There's something distinctly Candide in the young lovers’ maudlin naïveté and the bittersweet way they turn out. Meloy establishes his pessimism in the first iteration of the album’s title track: “Oh, the hazards of love / You’ll learn soon enough / The prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone.” The “hazards of love,” outlined thereafter, are legion: jealousy, ambivalence, lust, vengeance, and self-destruction, to name a few.

The album features some of the grungiest, guitar-thick arrangements the band has produced to date. The harpsichords, organs, and accordions are still there, though, along with Meloy’s distinctive, nasal melodies. And while the characters are by no means the most interesting ones Meloy has ever created, The Hazards of Love has enough dark, playful energy to be compelling anyway.

Carlin's words came back into my mind while watching Heartless Bastards perform at Stubbs Bar-B-Que. Surely this was a situation that he would have appreciated, an all-white blues band chugging away beneath the looming visage of a scowling black man.

But while this scene had some serious Blues Hammer-elements going on, I'm not sure I completely believe Carlin. Heartless Bastards was pretty good. Erika Wennerstrom had an appropriately leathery voice, and they played a heavier and moodier set than I would have expected from a band sitting on a bill with the Decemberists.