Pitchfork

You love to hate Marah, Philadelphia's rootsy, Springsteen-doppelganging, Nick Hornby-buddying, sometimes-slobbish ensemble led by the Bielanko brothers, Dave and Serge. You couldn't stand how they aped the Boss or ladled out fame-addled braggadocio a couple years back. Weren't they moving to Japan or Leeds or something upon releasing the shinier but sullen Brit-popping Float Away with the Friday Night Gods in 2002? Those sellouts!

Or you hate to love them and their drunken, Dylan-detailed lyrics, their richly-etched tales of Vietnam vets and locally colored romances, their smoke-and-Scotch soaked voices, their simmering, stargazing street-urchin sound.

Either way, who really cares? Water under the Passyunk Avenue Bridge. Somehow, Marah seemed to clean up their psychic detritus. Round about 2004, they stopped bragging and concentrated on re-focusing their self-produced noirsound. They not only founded their own label through Yep Roc (PHIdelity), but unleashed last year's unprickly, powerful 20,000 Streets Under the Sky, the urbane, urban opera their past records only alluded to.

Now, they've quickly followed that record with If You Didn't Laugh You'd Cry, a punk-folkish live-in-studio recording, due out October 18. That it packs the pungent punch of 2000's cult classic Kids in Philly with the surprising (some would say unsettling) cleanliness of Float Away makes Laugh, perhaps, the best of all Marah worlds. You can hear these songs mumbling and grumbling. Tracklist:

01 The Closer
02 The Hustle
03 City of Dreams
04 Fat Boy
05 Sooner or Later
06 Out of Tune
07 Demon of White Sadness
08 The Dishwasher's Dream
09 Poor People
10 Walt Whitman Bridge
11 The Apartment
12 The Sooner or Later Interlude

But wait, there's more! On that same October day, Marah will release A Christmas Kind of Town, their very first holiday record. This makes a lot of sense. Dave and Serge, acquainted with Philadelphian holiday customs like the drunken golden Mummers, tequila-spiked eggnog and beating up on Lit Brothers' Santas, are ripe candidates for the Christmas-time recording process. They claim, on the Yep Roc website, that they made this holiday record so as to "decorate our apartment studio with string lights and plastic snowmen and celebrate Christmas in July", as well as to "allow 'liberal' folks to celebrate certain 'conservative' values like family, friends, eating dinner together, roasting chestnuts and home fires burning without employing tactics like tightening borders, tax cuts for the elite, veiled racism, and Old Testament brainwashing." Ho ho ho:

01 Intro - Curtain Rises
02 Christmas Time Is Here (Featuring The Christmas Players)
03 New York Is A Christmas Kind Of Town
04 Baby It's Cold Outside (Featuring Felicia Navidad)
05 Boozing It Up With Friends (Skit)
06 Holly Jolly Christmas
07 Here We Come A Wassailing (#1)
08 Christmas Time's A Comin'
09 Let It Snow (Plastic Santa & The Eggnog Fog)
10 Quithmith Pudding (Skit)
11 Counting The Days ('Til Christmas)
12 Here We Come A Wassailing (#2)
13 Silver Bells
14 Christmas With The Snow
15 Have Yourself A Merry Little Xmas
16 Handsome Santa (Featuring Zuzu Petal)
17 Auld Lang Syne
18 Here We Come A Wassailing (#3)
19 Outro-Curtain Call
20 Counting The Days, A Christmas Polka

If you pre-order either album from the Yep Roc website, you can get limited edition color prints of original cover artwork by Dave Bielanko in glorious 11 x 14 form. And if you'd like to go wassailing up close and personal with the Bielankos and their merry men, you can catch Marah in concert at the following places and times:

10-01 Amsterdam, Holland - Take Root Festival
10-20 Baltimore, MD - Sonar
10-21 Hoboken, NJ - Maxwell's
10-22 Brooklyn, NY - Southpaw
10-23 Cambridge, MA - T.T. the Bears
10-25 Buffalo, NY - Mohawk Place
10-26 Cleveland, OH - Beachland Tavern
10-27 Chicago, IL - Abbey Pub
10-28 Milwaukee, WI - Onapa Brewing Company
10-29 Minneapolis, MN - The 400 Bar
11-02 Des Moines, IA - Vaudeville Mews
11-03 St. Louis, MO - Off Broadway
11-05 Oxford, MS - Proud Larry's
11-10 Indianapolis, IN - The Patio
11-11 Columbus, OH - High Five

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