“Hey, are you guys here to see the band?”

“We are the band.”

That’s how my night starts at The Horned Hand when five young guys drift up to the bar looking confused. Apparently, they are Animal Eyes. And, apparently, they are playing a show later.

These guys are inconspicuous, to say the least. Probably because they are all barely 21-years-old and were born and raised in Homer, Alaska.  They don’t look like the types who would rock the roof off a venue but somehow, in a town of about 5,000, they developed a unique brand of worldly folk rock that’s turning heads in Oregon.

“Pretty much no bands come there. I didn’t see one big show in Alaska,” explains Tyler Langham, one of two guitarists and one of three vocalists.

Without a lot of live music, the band was left to discover their own style. They will be bringing their passionate and unpretentious indie rock-and-roll to a second show at Silver Moon Brewing on Friday.

London-based band Trailer Trash Tracys aren’t likely to find themselves anywhere near prefabricated housing after releasing their gracious and nuance-driven debut album, Ester.

With songs washed in lo-fi greatness around every corner, lead singer Susanne Aztoria and her trio of supporting musicians have succeeded in doing something with Ester that several other bands embracing the lo-fi sound (and there have been a ton of them in the last two years) haven’t done. They have allowed the focus to remain on the album’s svelte genre diversity instead of creating songs that sound alike and struggle to find their own individual identity.
Opening with the acid jazz-inspired track “Rolling-Kiss the Universe,” Ester takes subtle and inspiring turns into ambient rock on “You Wish You Were Red,” island pop on “Dies in 55,” and reaches a rousing apex on the seventh track “Candy Girl.” A song that channels haunting David Bowie-esque pop over the bass line from Twin Peaks, “Candy Girl” may not immediately seem like the album’s climax, but its sweet comforting approach makes it a track that listeners are likely to return to over and over again. Utilizing an array of electro-drum beats, Ester is an album for fans of Braids and Phantogram. And as a result of its slight style shifts between songs, this collection is the possible evolution for dark lo-fi music in 2012.

You have been hearing plenty about the surging and expanding world of Americana music in this paper and most every other music publication this side of Tiger Beat and how bands like Mumford and Sons, The Avett Brothers and, hell, even our own Larry and His Flask are changing our conception of traditional music.

A strong argument could be made that Danny Barnes – a Texas-bred, Seattle-based banjo and guitar player initially known as the front man of the Bad Livers – was one of the original musicians to pretzel Americana sounds into new ground. With the Bad Livers and as a solo artist, Barnes blended rootsy, acoustic sounds with alt-country, rock and even some funk to create a style unique to his name.

Peter Yarrow, Mary Travers and Noel Paul Stookey sang about "the hammer of justice," "the bell of freedom" and "the song about love between my brothers and my sisters, all over this land," many times as their version of Pete Seeger and Lee Hayes' "If I Had a Hammer" rose to number 10 on the Billboard national pop singles chart.

But one day was different.

This was not the trendy folk clubs of Greenwich Village or the friendly confines of a Northeast coffee shop.

The date was August 28, 1963, and the place was the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a brimming mall on a balmy, 84-degree day in Washington, DC. where Dr. Martin Luther King was about to deliver one of the most stirring and famous speeches in history, “I Have a Dream.”