BY JENNIFER KELLY

Cave Singers and Lightning Dust have a fair amount in common. Both are from the Northwest - Cave Singers from Seattle, Lightning Dust from Vancouver - and seldom play the smaller towns on the east coast. (Lightning Dust has been to Northampton once, Cave Singers never.)  Both are offshoots of louder bands in aggressive punk and rock traditions. Derek Fudesco was in Murder City Devils and Pretty Girls Make Graves before Cave Singers, and Amber Webber and Joshua Wells both hail from the Black Mountain family. And both are now exploring gentler, more traditional Americana sounds - though with an edge and intensity that comes from rock.

There's even been some cross-collaboration between the bands. Cave Singers' first album Invitation Songs was recorded in Vancouver with Black Mountain's Colin Stewart and both Amber and her sister Ashley Webber (here tonight playing bass) sang back up on the band's second album Welcome Joy.

So while both bands are far from home, the evening has a relaxed and comfortable feel. I arrive around nine with only a few minutes to go in MV + EE's set, the Brattleboro-based duo of Matt Valentine and Erika Elder. Just the two of them, seated, both playing guitars, they pick out eerie and intricate patterns on old instruments. (There will be a new album later this year called Barn Nova on the Ecstatic Peace label.)  And then the set is over.

Lightning Dust sets up next, Joshua Wells behind an electric keyboard, Amber Webber in front with a guitar, sister Ashley to one side on bass and backup vocals, and Ryan Peters from Ladyhawk on drums. Given her voice, a strong flute-y sort of instrument, with a wide tremor of vibrato in it, I'd always pictured Amber Webber as a kind of latter day Stevie Nicks, but there she is, in a sensible ponytail and jeans, looking not at all gothic or haunted or even very dramatic as she begins floating the tremulous notes out during soundcheck. Still, there's no denying the ghostliness of her voice during the set, set off by the wavery clarity of Wells' piano, the subtle shadings of her sister's harmonies. The set hits most of the highlights from Lightning Dust's latest Infinite Light, the big 1970s piano pop intro to "History" and its soaring, waltzing "La de dah" refrain, the big pounding drums and rocking rush of "I Knew," the slow-chorded simplicity of "Dreamer." Lightning Dust's first album was a quiet, acoustic affair, its second leaning more toward piano-driven pop. The live show bridges the two styles, with songs often starting out sparse and gaining dimension, even lushness, as the Wells' piano notes shift upward and the two girls move in closer to the mic.

"Antonia Jane", later in the set, has a gospel country purity, both Webbers joining in a sweet refrain of "I declare a war for you...someday soon," but "The Times" gallops headlong, all pounding drums with a swirly, calliope-ish keyboard solo mid-cut. The band plays their Budgie cover, "Wondering What Everyone Knows," Webber's sweet, slightly overripe soprano adding nuance to the song's big anthemic hooks.

The Cave Singers close out the night, first insisting that everyone move up to the dance floor, instead of lurking at the tables in the back. "We're going to be dancing around and making fools of ourselves up here," says the singer, Pete Quirk. "Come up here where we can see you."  And so, people do filter up to the front and a few are even dancing by the end. Only Quirk, though, is much for dancing around on stage. Derek Fudesco - the one from Murder City Devils -- remains seated, hunched over his guitar, face down as he picks out complicated patterns of bends and, occasionally, some slide. Drummer Marty Lund plays hard but stoically behind the kit, thumping out the rock rhythms that ground Cave Singers alchemical mix of blues, old Chess Records licks and country folk.

They begin with "Leap" off the new album, Quirk making large, theatrical gestures - hand to ear, hand to heart, arms extended - as he trills a ghostly falsetto'd blues. Fudesco meanwhile plucks away, coaxing a bluegrassy complexity out of his guitar, one foot operating a tambourine rig. For "I Don't Mind," the rhythm is straight-up rock, boom cha, boom-boom cha, on the drums, the guitar blurring into drone like a countrified Velvet Underground or Oakley Hall on a good night. But it's "At the Cut" where the set really takes fire, a Bo Diddley tribal meld of pummeling beat and hard-strummed blues guitars, Quirk punching out ecstatic "heys" and like he's speaking in tongues. For "Shrine," the drummer switches to bongos, the singer to fluttery, disembodied blues, the guitar player to serpentine bends, running up and down the neck of his guitars.

For "Summer Light", Amber Webber comes back up on stage and Quirk switches to a tiny guitar with a silvery soprano tone. The song, with its intersecting lattices of guitar notes, its supple slides of vocal melody, its sudden surges of harmonies, is full of quiet joy, bursting through finally into louder celebration. Webber traces high, strident counterpoint to Quirk's weathered voice, and it is an altogether wonderful moment, a high point of the whole set.

The Cave Singers are not hugely into banter, but Quirk is a little more voluble than either Wells (who tries) and Webber (who doesn't). He mentions that the band has never been to Northampton, that they like the town and are thinking of enrolling at Smith College. "Can guys even do that?" he asks, of no one in particular. "Grad school," someone answers. And he grins, "Well, then we'll all come here and study creative writing...or medicine, one of the two." There is a call for "Dancing on our Graves," from the first album, which he demurs, observing, "We're getting to that. We don't want to shoot our load."   

Things get cozy enough with the crowd that Quirk eventually requests - and receives - a set of shots for everyone in the band, which they drain just before the encore. ("I can feel my balls trembling," Quirk observes, just after.)  It helps; the remainder of the set is looser, freakier and way more intense, Quirk writhing like a revival preacher, a washboard coming into play, and drummer Lund eventually coming up on stage for an all-hands-on-guitar closer sweetened with harmonies.

Folk purists be damned. That old time music sound just fine when the punk rockers take it up.

[Photos Credit: Jennifer Kelly]