The Sons of Town Hall step on from two sides of the stage at The Kate.
One is from rural Kentucky, the other from sooty London. Wearing a stovepipe, bowler, wilted neck scarves and scruffy boots, they meet in the center and shake hands.
To the sound of waves crashing, a voiceover tells us about two vagabond musicians, how fate drew them together in London a century and a half ago. Here they are, onstage.
Then this duo blends voices and sings its way into our hearts in 30 seconds flat — a cappella, to boot. You can hear a pin drop.
How do they do that?
Well, first of all, this “historical” band — kind of like a romance novel — is a great idea.
Musical groups throughout folk rock history have entertained alter-egos. The Beatles as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Bob Dylan as The Rolling Thunder Review. The Band as, well, The Band.
But not many groups have the prowess to commit to total theater.
“George Ulysses Brown” (aka Ben Parker) and “Josiah Chester Jones” (aka David Berkeley) can do it, and they do. These gifted performers take the premise of the traveling troubadour and stretch it to its limits — into mythology.
The Sons sail around the world on a barge patched together out of “needle and thread, an old oak door, linen cloth, a 6-foot pinewood box.” They live alternately on land and sea. They write legendary anthems for 19th-century expeditions to Antarctica; they pen revolutionary marches for sweatshops in Dusseldorf.
Their story is endlessly allegorical; they push it to hilarious lengths. Between songs and banter, the Sons move from clown-show farce to tear-jerking gravity. No mean feat.
The other thing to know about Sons of Town Hall — they sing like angels.
Their sound: a little Mumford & Sons, a little Richard Thompson, with their own sense of considerable distillation and charisma. The harmonies are gorgeous; two facile voices fly above and below each other like hummingbirds. The Gibson guitar work is nuanced, spare, inventive.
And it’s great songwriting. “Snow in Mexico” and “Louise” are bittersweet love elegies; “Honest Man” has a hopeful walk-to-the-altar feel. “St. Jerome” is a prayer to “help me be a better man.” “The Line Between” laments out disjunctions in life: “young and old, love and war, green and gold.”
A recurring theme is how to be a good person at all ages, contending with inner and outer demons — the rambling life, love loss, confusion, itchy fingers — and how to shake off webs of illusion the world throws around you.
This last point is a clue to who Sons of Town Hall are named after — a real boat. Son of Town Hall was a barge made entirely out of trash that sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1998. It was built by American musician Poppa Neutrino, whose real life reads like “Tom Sawyer.” A nomad, musician, raft-builder and founder of the band The Flying Neutrinos, Neutrino lived much of his life on public waterways — in New Orleans, Mexico, New York, and Burlington, Vermont — and on his own terms.
This kind of self-making seems to be what Sons of Town Hall are doing in the music business and in their own lives as artists. Sail on, Sons.