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	CONCRETE BLONDE, TWINEMEN, AND THE DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS Unconventional treats

Hold on a minute: were Concrete Blonde always this good? I remember them from the ’80s and ’90s as a sturdy, lively rock band with a magnetic singer and a couple of good albums plus a hit single ("Joey") that jumped out of the radio in 1990. But I don’t recall their being anywhere near as mesmerizing as they were at the Middle East a week ago Thursday.

On their second post-reunion tour, singer/bassist Johnette Napolitano, guitarist Jim Mankey, and new drummer Gabriel Ramirez drew a smaller crowd than they did when they filled the Middle East two years ago. But that only meant that the audience got the full force of Napolitano’s personality. Still looking spectral in darkened eyes and unkempt hair, she was loose and chatty between songs, only to become gloriously unhinged when she started singing. And Napolitano, who was in town for the DNC-related Democracy Now conference, had a lot on her mind: The set opened with "The Real Thing," a new anti-war song that took its lyrics from letters sent by soldiers in Iraq and borrowed some of its ominous sound from Hendrix’s "Machine Gun." Later she noted that "I may hate it, but I have to vote for John Kerry. Sometimes you just have to be a grown-up." And a spooky cover of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" explained why there was a handful of goths in the audience.

Yet the more personal songs proved to be the grabbers, particularly the ones from 2002’s mid-life-crisis-inspired Group Therapy (Manifesto). "When I Was a Fool" found Napolitano observing that people seemed to like her better when she was younger and more reckless. But the trademark banshee wails indicated that she’s not going anywhere gently.

If you’d walked in on Twinemen’s opening set for Concrete Blonde without looking, you might have thought they’d added a really good lead-guitarist. But they haven’t — it was just Dana Colley putting his sax through a wah-wah pedal and a few other treatments. Those sounds were a good indication that Twinemen have moved beyond their Morphine origins, but there were a few others. Laurie Sargent has found her songwriting voice in the band, adding a political element that Morphine never had, and her voice evinces a smart, bohemian cool that blends well with the slinky rhythms. On the closing "Definition of Truth," Colley wailed on harmonica while Billy Conway played an uncharacteristic straight-ahead backbeat. In their early years, the band sounded like Morphine Mark II, but with a second album in the can, they’ve found their own groove pretty much on schedule.

The Democratic National Convention was also responsible for bringing a scaled-down version of the Drive-By Truckers to the Middle East a week ago Monday night. Although it was billed as a solo gig by leader Patterson Hood, the night found three-fifths of the Truckers — Hood, singer/guitarist Jason Isbell, and bassist Shonna Tucker — doing two long sets for an audience that included, by my rough count, only three people who weren’t DNC visitors. These, it turned out, were the same three people in the crowd who’d ever heard of the band.

The Truckers seemed honored by the occasion, if frustrated with the less-than-attentive audience. "I’m just telling you this story in case you don’t feel like listening to the song," Isbell blurted out during one intro. But the crowd (or at least the three of us) got to hear a live preview of the forthcoming album The Dirty South (New West) plus a couple of surprise covers: Big Star’s "I’m in Love with a Girl" and Little Feat’s "Sailin’ Shoes."

When they play electric, the Truckers are the perfect modern-day band for anyone who loves both those songs, reviving classically Southern rock with some left-field, alt-pop consciousness. But with the songs stripped down to basics, it sounded more as if the Truckers had moved into Steve Earle’s old niche as the thinking person’s redneck rockers, with a lot of Southern pride and a mile-wide populist streak. The latter was especially evident in the new songs: before "Sands of Iwo Jima," Hood spoke of watching the Allan Dwan movie with his great-uncle, who served in the real battle, and hearing him note that "I never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima." This, of course, turned out to be the song’s chorus. Likewise, the unemployment-themed "Puttin’ People on the Moon" was fueled by Hood’s having grown up in an Alabama town with a defunct rocket factory. "We used to go on vacation to Flint, Michigan," he deadpanned.

On the new album, both those songs are occasions for three-guitar demolition, but they sounded just fine played bare-bones at the Middle East; Hood and Isbell even stood up and swung their acoustics around during the finales. And the band played their first full-fledged country song, the new disc’s "Goddamn Lonely Love." It’s a classic-model barroom weeper, good enough to live up to the title.

The electric Truckers are set to play the Paradise on September 14 — though as Isbell noted on stage, "Hold on, I’m never playing the Paradise again. They called the cops on me for smoking last time."