Felice Bros. @ Birchmere, 4/15

Despite the hellish drive from Baltimore to Alexandria during rush hour, I had a lovely time with KB seeing the Felice Brothers, the latest greatest hillbilly punk band (or are they just a punky hillbilly band?) to emerge from New York. I love this band's self-titled record, mainly because they sound just like The Band on a lot of tracks, but also because they make music that is strikingly rough-edged in an era where that's becoming the norm for garage rock bands, but still hasn't caught on in the country scene. Bluegrass is great, sure, with all its flourish and technical wizardry and hot fiddling, but there was certainly a vacuum to be filled for bands that play low-budg old-time string band music with the same type of voracity that the Sex Pistols or the Stooges played rock. A few years ago, Old Crow Medicine Show started the big push to fill that gap. The Felice Brothers, from upstate New York, are the latest.

Fittingly, drummer Simone Felice was wearing an OCMS t-shirt while he sat behind the kit. His two brothers, James (accordion, keyboards, vocals) and Ian (guitar, lead vocals) were two his right, along with Greg Farley, the slightly ADD fiddler and washboard-scraper who did lots of vaguely hip-hop dance moves when he wasn't playing and wore absurd nut-hugger jeans, and Christmas, the group's bizarre, strung-out looking bassist. They played a good mix of songs from Felice Brothers and their new one, Yonder Is the Clock, which came out just a few weeks ago. "Run Chicken Run," "Cooperstown," and "The Big Surprise" were new to me, while "Helen Fry" and "Frankie's Gun!" were raucous and familiar. Highlights were "The Greatest Show On Earth" and "Radio Song," and very rough-edged version of "Whiskey In My Whiskey," which had a fast, hustling beat, lots of yelling, and featured Ian playing a dirty country guitar solo while standing on his brother's bass drum.

The thing about the Felice Brothers is, they sound like shit in concert. But then again, they sort of sound like shit on record. Their singing voices would make most A&R men cringe. Their playing isn't amateurish, per se -- it's just not especially impressive. What they've got, really, is a real sense of poetry to their songs, dressed up in ripped clothing and wild, drunken energy. "We're just a bunch of dirtbags," Ian said at one point in the show. And he was right on. Christmas, the wide-eyed, strung-out looking bassist, literally had no elbows on his shirt, it was so badly torn. The five of them kept drinking from one another's beers and passing a pack of cigarettes around during the show. Farley, when he wasn't scratching out gloriously scratchy double-stop solos, was either smashing the drum kit's cymbals with a washboard or messing around with the other players' instruments. When they finally ended the set, with a hoarse, drunken version of Townes Van Zandt's "Two Hands" -- my favorite TVZ song, coincidentally -- no one in the crowd wasn't dancing.