BY ROXANA HADADI

For bands specializing in trippy indie rock, you don’t have to look much farther than the now-disbanded, but still much-adored, Elephant Six Collective. Thankfully, contributor Elf Power has stuck around in the land of men (Lord of the Rings pun intended), bringing spacey, sometimes-hard-hitting, sometimes-haunting tunes to fans everywhere.

Elf Power brought their impressively huge discography to The Rock and Roll Hotel in Washington Thursday, performing a variety of tracks from their latest album – In a Cave, released in March – and their previous nine to a crowd of … well, tens of fans.

The approximately 50 attendees – that’s a generous estimate – trickled into the club, first when the doors opened at 8 p.m. and later during the opening band, Ham1’s, set. The trio (who is actually a foursome, but was short a keyboardist who slipped, hurt his back and had to sit the show out in Manassas) shares their hometown, Athens, Ga., with Elf Power, but not much else. Their 12-song set lasted barely half an hour, as they ripped through a variety of songs from all three of their albums, The Underground Stream, The Captain’s Title and their self-titled debut.

And when Elf Power took the stage at a little after 9:30 p.m., they similarly seemed to be missing members. While the band’s website claims it has six members, only four – headed, of course, by singer and main songwriter Andrew Rieger – appeared for this date. With no preamble, the group immediately launched into “Owl Cut (White Flowers in the Sky),” the first track from In a Cave. At only 2 minutes and 24 seconds, the song was a buzzing, distorted intro into Elf Power’s bizarre sound.

Next was “Spiral Stairs,” a grunge-y, fuzzy track also off the new album that showcased Rieger’s ethereal, fantastical lyrics. “I walked alone into places unknown/ Where the wild creatures lay with the children all day,” Rieger sang. “There I could see rising up from beneath/ A blue flower was growing from under the ocean/ Then the thunder pulled me away/ And the lightning ripped through the sky/ All around me, the world was so strange/ Like the book I always wanted to write.”

Thanks to solid instrumentals and a layered harmony, “Spiral Stairs” was a fitting precursor to Rieger’s next two songs, throwbacks in the form of “We Dream in Sound” and “An Old Familiar Scene.” From 1999’s A Dream in Sound and 2006’s Back to the Web, respectively, both songs were (unexpected) old favorites, displaying Elf Power’s entrancing forays into psychedelics. While the band stretched “We Dream in Sound” into a longer, more jam-like adventure, “An Old Familiar Scene” was almost scorching in its delivery, as Rieger sang against a soaring guitar line: “I can see you far away, off in another time/ Still ride on, the world is gone, and somehow you survived/ You sit there by the window, looking out into the rain/ Everyone was waiting, but you never, ever came.”

Before moving entirely into new territory, Elf Power indulged the smallish crowd with another old song, “Come Lie Down With Me,” also from Back to the Web. The yearning love song has some seriously earnest, seriously morbid lyrics (“In the dream, I was older/ And I sat on a bench in the dark/ You came up, from the ground/And you followed me into the dark”) that are coincidentally similar to Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark” (“Love of mine, someday you will die/ But I’ll be close behind/ I’ll follow you into the dark”) from 2005’s Plans. Who knew Rieger and Ben Gibbard could share brainwaves?

Most of the rest of Elf Power’s 17-song set was made up of newer compositions, with varying degrees of success. While “The New Mythology” was a less-weird-than-normal song that enjoyably switched between up- and down-tempo, “Paralyzed” and “The Demon’s Daughter” were slower, more meandering songs that never really went anywhere.

But the band redeemed itself for the concert’s lagging second half with a two-song encore, during which they played the super oldie “The Arrow Flies Close,” from their second album, 1997’s When the Red King Comes, and a cover of T. Rex’s “20^th Century Boy.” Both unexpected performances made the encore the highlight of the entire night, and while ending on a cover may not be the best idea – leaving a crowd remembering music other than your own?

As if – Elf Power pulled it off pretty damn well. Just like rock’n’roll, indeed.

[All photos by Adam Fried]