Catamount Tavern News Service, February 28th, 2008 -Langdon Street Café is a collectively run venue/coffee house/bar on the corner of Elm and Langdon Streets in Montpelier, Vermont. It is primarily a folk venue, but at one time or another books just about any genre. As a venue, they have a particular fondness for folk-punk fusion acts, that is to say acts that play a traditional style of music with a punk flair or attitude. Two such bands will grace the café stage in the coming month, and both are profiled below.

Luminescent Orchestrii: www.lummi.org, Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 9 PM, $5 at the door.

This great band out of NYC is turning heads with their brand of Balkan inspired music and great live shows. Luminescent Orchestrii fuses Romanian Gypsy melodies, salty tangos, hard-driving klezmer, hip hop beats and Appalachian fiddle with punk rock frenzy to create their signature sound. They have toured extensively in and out of the U.S, including stints in Eastern Europe where they gathered knowledge first-hand of the roots of their Balkan-inspired sound. The instrumentation of the band is at the heart of their music, and includes two violins, resophonic guitar, upright bass and bullhorn harmonica. This makes for a sound where the two violins edgily flirt back and forth over a forcefully aggressive yet super-tight attack by the rhythm section. Originally formed in 2002 as a quintet, the band has honed itself down to a pinpoint focused foursome. Though the members of the Orchestrii come from different scenes in New York City, they come together through their love of Balkan and Gypsy music. Sxip Shirey is an international circus composer, Sarah Alden is an old-time fiddle player, Rima Fand is an experimental theater composer, and Benjy Fox-Rosen is a free-jazz bassist. It is not uncommon to find Sxip playing tampon applicators with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, Rima composing music for a Lorca puppet show, Benjy schlepping his bass to a jazz gig, or Sarah fiddling away at some all-night old-time session. Expect a frenzied, kinetic explosion of gypsy punk bravado when the Orchestrii takes the stage the second Saturday in March for a show any fan of traditional music and/or punk rock won’t want to miss.

Pariah Beat: www.myspace.com/pariahbeat , Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 8 PM – donations.

An excellent roots/punk/Americana band out of Thetford, Vermont of all places, Pariah Beat produce a sound that is at once familiar and hard to describe. Though not a political band, this show will be augmented by a presentation commemorating the 5th anniversary of the current Iraq War, and will feature some speakers and other presentations prior to the bands set (don’t expect your typical anti-war rantings – these guys aim to keep it real). Some songs sound like Irish Sea shanties, some like barroom honky-tonk anthems, and some like Appalachian high-lonesome, but all are played with a punk-rock attitude at an aggressive and hard-driving clip. They are rowdy, fun and full of spunk, and their lyrical content attests to this attitude, with lines like “your faith in Christ is quite alright, but I’ve got Rock and Roll”, and song titles like “I’ll Take a Drink”. Indeed, this is boisterous drinking music, designed for spilling your pint all over the dance floor. The band has been touring extensively as of late, recently having played Mardi Gras shows in New Orleans and a string of shows in the Southeast and Midwest. Expect a ruckus of a good time at Langdon Street when they take the stage, and since it will be a Wednesday, there’s a special with $2.25 PBR pints – perfect! See ‘em before there’s a cover charge!

Ed DuFresne is the talent coordinator for the Langdon Street Café and occasionally produces concerts. He lives in Montpelier with an aspiring lawyer, a budding artist, and bird named Lucy.