Midway through Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards' show Tuesday night at Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, she welcomed a familiar face onstage to the delight of the hundreds in attendance.

It wasn't necessarily a surprise: A few folks had already spotted Bon Iver's Justin Vernon in his hooded yellow sweatshirt, commingling in the audience with old friends from his Raleigh days, and it's no secret that Vernon produced Edwards' outstanding new album Voyageur. Devoted fans might also have noticed that videos of the two performing a few songs together at her Sunday night performance in Atlanta had turned up on YouTube in the past couple of days.

What had already been a terrific performance by Edwards was kicked up a notch when Vernon joined in on guitar for the exquisite ballad "Wapusk," released last Fall as a single. Edwards explained it was the first song she and Vernon recorded together, an auspicious collaboration that eventually led to much greater connections both professionally and personally.

Vernon stuck around for another number before leaving Edwards in the hands of her very capable bandmates. Lead guitarist Gord Tough's contributions were muscular but tasteful, and opening act Hannah Georgas added gorgeous harmonies to many songs.

Although Voyageur debuted at No. 39 on the Billboard album charts last week, Edwards' fans responded most enthusiastically to older favorites such as "Six O'Clock News" (from 2002's Failer) and "In State" (from 2005's Back To Me). Near the end of the set, she thanked the crowd for their willingness to also hear the new material, most of which was delivered with bounds of confidence and emotion, particularly the fast-galloping opener "Empty Threat" and the brooding mid-set heartbreaker "Pink Champagne."

Vernon reappeared during the encore to join Edwards on "Mercury," another song from Failer that seems to have played a minor role in bringing the two together. (In a phone interview two weeks ago, Edwards noted that she'd heard Bon Iver had covered "Mercury" onstage before the two singers had met; indeed, YouTube turns up a rendition of the song by Vernon and his band at the Sasquatch Festival near Seattle in May 2009.) They closed with "For The Record," a seven-minute coda to a past relationship which concludes the new album and was stretched out even longer onstage. "I only wanted to sing songs," Edwards attested in the chorus; on this night, that was more than enough, with a little help from her friends.

• Riding in to help: Megafaun

Before last Saturday, I had never heard of a venue selling out twice in one evening. But at Motorco, the first half of the night—a benefit for the Central Park School For Children—opened with a mob of young children and their parents anxiously awaiting the student performances to begin. The joy projected by the student bands, their friends and families was overwhelming. All you could see was smiles everywhere—none more so than with the "adult" instructors, like Phil Cook, Christy Smith, and Heather McEntire, who worked with each student band to develop original material.

After the student performance, the full crowd slowly began to thin and transition to grown-ups attending the event of the evening—The Beast, Mount Moriah and Megafaun. Much like the first half of the show, the second provided a refreshing experience. Between each performance, area high school students in the group Poetic Justice treated the crowd to a number of profound pieces. The Beast, Mount Moriah and Megafaun did not handle this as a standard performance, either. New songs and arrangements debuted, all somehow accompanied by a familial and comforting atmosphere.

Friday night’s performance at The ArtsCenter in Carrboro offered an interesting array of area musicians, centered for an evening around gospel songs. While that might immediately turn off some concertgoers, the songs being played—at least according to Gathering Church Associate Pastor Chris Breslin—were more soul music than anything else.

He was right, too. Jeff Crawford and company worked their way through many of the songs on their new compilation Hymns From The Gathering Church. Throughout the evening, the band switched through countless formations, transitioning smoothly from song to song as though this were a band who had toured on the material previously. Below are several clips from the evening.

Jeff Mangum
w/ Andrew, Laura & Scott
Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill
January 30, 2012

• Illustration by Chris Williams

Photography was not permitted at Jeff Mangum’s show in Chapel Hill on Monday night, increasing the sense that we were about to witness a rare, delicate artifact that could be damaged by bright lights. Yet the person that emerged seemed average, affable and mild, more like someone who had just woken up refreshed after being in suspended animation for 13-odd years than a wild-eyed hermit. He could have easily passed for an art-class extra on My So-Called Life, with lank hair hanging down like Snoopy ears below a puffy engineer cap—a doubly appropriate chapeau for the captain of the time-travel machine that UNC’s Memorial Hall had become.

Indeed, our coordinates were set for the late-’90s, just before Mangum mostly absconded from public and musical life after creating one of the most enduringly beloved indie albums ever, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Of the roughly 1,400 of us on the voyage, some were 30- or 40-somethings consummating a longtime dream, and maybe reminiscing a bit. Many others were undergraduates, perched on the edges of their seats to see a musician whose last record came out when they were small children.

Released by Merge Records in 1998, Aeroplane was a surreal pop and folk record with lyrics full of cryptic references to Anne Frank and steampunk machines, sung with overwhelming force. The record felt like visiting a burned-down and quite haunted carnival, thanks to Mangum’s affinity for slackened keys, tin-horn harshness, phonograph wobbles—really, all manner of penny-arcade cheapness.

But this uncanny style only partly accounts for Aeroplane’s seemingly permanent status as a holy relic of indie music. It’s accurate but misleading to say that the record appeared at the dawn of the Internet age: in fact, it was the abrupt twilight of hermetic ’90s indie rock. We cherish it as the beautiful last gasp of something bigger than music—a way of life, or of thinking about life. We got to revisit that magically transient moment, when ’90s indie ended two years early, on Monday night. For a little while, it was as if electroclash, dubstep and chillwave had never surfaced.

The evening began with an opening set by Andrew Rieger, Laura Carter and Scott Spillane—all part of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, a label and collective with strong roots in Denver, Athens and antique pop. All were also involved in the creation of Aeroplane, and their set bore ample evidence of the collective quirks that have come to sound Mangum-esque, thanks to his breakout sainthood. There was incredibly loud singing from Spillane, who looked like a trucker Santa Claus. There was pitchy beer-bottle slide guitar by Carter. There were off-kilter, hollowed-out, two-chord grinders, and there was tinker-toy timekeeping.

With a quirky instrumental palette dominated by guitars and horns, the ensemble drew material from their own bands—Elf Power and the Gerbils—and played covers of artists from Chris Knox to Randy Newman (a sour and forbidding “In Germany Before the War”). The Rieger-led Elf Power songs stood out as being R.E.M.-ishly professional among the weird, ramshackle excursions, marking him as the straight man of this merry carny troupe.

Any worries that Mangum’s set would be as loose and meandering were dispelled when he strode onstage, sat down in a ring of acoustic guitars, and ripped into “Two-Headed Boy Pt. 2.” The set resembled the one captured on the disc Live at Jittery Joe’s, with fan favorites stripped down to voice and guitar but otherwise rendered with all the memorized nuances. In other words, the set was ideal for an artist who hasn’t meaningfully performed or recorded in so long. Perhaps in acknowledgement of the hefty price of the ticket, Mangum reeled through hit after hit with no filler—“Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone,” all the parts of “King of Carrot Flowers,” “Oh Comely,” “Song Against Sex.” The opening crew returned at intervals to supply iconic horn passages and other signposts, as Mangum traced the vocal contours he engraved in vinyl long age. His voice narrowed to a reedy keen, shot up in a vertiginous howl and drew out notes to Guinness Book-worthy lengths, as though it were a willful beast that, once released from its cage, only goes back in when it’s good and ready.

Mangum’s diction bent under the stress of his singing, vowels changing into other vowels, consonants washing out into groans. His voice pushed against the roof of his mouth as if trying to take his head off. That vibrato-resistant howl sometimes felt a little strange in the formal hall—occasionally, an innocent bystander might have wondered if Mangum was hard of hearing. “I know this is a strange place but you guys can yell at me,” Mangum said, searching for interaction. “It’s not like the punk rock days where you got spit on!” That’s just what happens when indie culture goes to the museum.

But it led me to try and imagine: If I walked into this cold, with no knowledge of Mangum’s legacy and no nostalgic attachment to his records, how would I feel about this guy, all alone onstage at Memorial, beating up a cracked guitar and shouting through his nose? But I couldn’t do it—once Neutral Milk Hotel’s oddities get into you, especially at an impressionable age, there’s no going back.

Spider Bags, Paint Fumes, Flesh Wounds, Brainbows, Snake
Thursday, Jan. 26
La Salamandra, Durham

La Salamandra isn’t designed for hosting rock bands, and it shows. The unassuming taco shack on Hillsborough Rd. features a long, narrow floorplan, divided by an elevated bar and chest-high barricade. The stage, if you want to call it that, is little more than a nook set back into the middle of the room’s length, just large enough for a drummer and some amps and placed so that, last night, most of the crowd would be treated to a side-view of the five performing acts. The sound was problematic, too.

But none of that really hindered the benefit concert organized as a fundraiser to help alleviate the medical bills that local artist Dan Melchior and his wife, Letha Rodman Melchior, have been accruing since Letha’s cancer diagnosis more than a year ago. The show, despite the less-than-ideal setup, roared away.

Plagued by feedback from the PA, and inaudible backing vocals, for instance, Spider Bags started their headlining set at a disadvantage. Still, through the course of it, and especially in their more well-known songs—“Que Viva El Rocanroll,” “Teenage Eyes” and “Dog In The Snow”—the band managed a solid performance.
That handicap was exacerbated by their placement behind a double header of scrappy, relatively new bands. Charlotte’s Paint Fumes slobbered through a half-hour of addictive garage rock, sneaking flashes of 13th Floor Elevators psych-rock and Cramps surf into their set (which ended, naturally, with a busted Silvertone and a cymbal tossed off the drum kit). Flesh Wounds—the Chapel Hill trio of Last Year’s Men’s Montgomery Morris, The Moaners’ Laura King and The Future Kings of Nowhere’s Dan Kinney—offered a set of Oblivians-inspired garage favorably shaded with early-Jawbreaker melodies.

Brainbows’ post-punk rumble and Snake’s fluid twang-jam served as capable openers as the audience, which eventually spilled out onto La Salamandra’s large patio, filled the room. It’s easy—and probably unavoidable—to wonder if the show might’ve been better in a different venue with stage lighting and a better sound system, but that actually misses the point.

Craig Powell—the Durham promoter who often books shows at his nearby house, The Layabout—took the mic between sets to remind the gathered crowd why they were here, and why he’d organized this gig. Dan Melchior Und Das Menace, the band in which Letha Melchior Rodman plays with her husband, played both Powell’s 29th and 30th birthday parties, he said. This was about returning the favor, he said: “It’s the least we can do for them."

Donate to Dan and Letha Melchior at melchiorfund.blogspot.com.