By ZACHARY HERRMANN

Playing Rams Head Live in Baltimore is a thankless job in itself. The venue calls to mind a refurbished factory space built to best maximize the bar set up (they have five of them) rather than good acoustics. It's not a rock club so much as a rock space.

With all this in mind, it was surprising to hear Portland, Ore.'s Blitzen Trapper (I'll be damned if the name doesn't call to mind a Nazi hunting party) come out so strong at the start of the band's 45-minute show. Alas, it was not sound issues plaguing the band by the end of the set but a generally sloppy approach to the group's material. Pulling heavily from its latest release, Furr, Blitzen Trapper delivered solid renditions of the more compact songs ("Sleepytime in the Western World," "Saturday Nite," "Wild Mountain Nation") but struggled when stretching out some of the looser numbers.

On record, the group - purveyor of post- Odelay Americana that it is - loves them plenty of reverb and noise interference (which would explain some of the Wilco comparisons). However, when deviating from the original album song structures, Blitzen Trapper steered into trouble. The half-baked jamming and transitions just don't suit the band live.

Based around "Love U," the droning section of the set started to lose the crowd as the band lost momentum - beware of those impatient Baltimore hipsters, they'll roast you to death with those plastic-rimmed glares. Eric Earley and company certainly seem to have the passion and ambition necessary to carry an opening slot, but the hitches in the night called into question whether the scattershot playing was part of an off-night or larger problem.

Still, when Blitzen Trapper stuck to what it does best - down-home, electric pop, served briskly - the results were enjoyable. At any given moment, the group can come out echoing bits of Supergrass or The Band, which speaks both to the versatility and, hopefully, staying power of the group. The songs are there, it's just a matter of the other shoe dropping with time.

***

Iron & Wine - Tuesday's main act - was a different story altogether. Although Sam Beam entered quietly with his sister, violinist/vocalist Sarah, to start things off with his trademark whispered acoustics, the night ended in rousing full-bodied jams. With 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, Beam largely left behind his sparse and beautiful (but occasionally tepid) balladry for something a little more interesting.

With a guitarist, two drummers, a bassist and piano player (not counting Beam and his sister), Iron & Wine is now a swinging live outfit, ready to and willing to reshape Beam's entire songbook under the laws of his new groove. The slow, chugging pass of time - a favorite musical and lyrical motif in Beam's writing - has been supplanted in favor of dizzying West African rhythm with psychedelic trimmings.

The band built gradually to a knockout closer: a spacey reading of "Woman King" (almost unrecognizable in its much elongated form until the riff kicked in) played straight into "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)." Just before, an older tune, "Cinder and Smoke," got a similar bayou-funk treatment, as did "Sodom, South Georgia."    

The crowd was mostly receptive, although not quite as willing as the artist to accept the reworked versions of old favorites. As Beam mused, "Indie rockers don't like to dance," so instead many stood in either complete reverence or slight disdain. When he played the oldies how they liked ‘em though ("Weary Memory," "Each Coming Night," "Upward Over the Mountain"), it was all awe.        

Sometimes you just have to trust where an artist wants to take his music; whether or not the listeners are ready to commit 100 percent seems irrelevant if the guy has already made up his mind. Beam took a big risk in sacrificing his bedroom intimacy; more so than not, the crowds have followed. Let them drag their feet a little along the way, they'll come around.    

***

Individual act ratings:

Blitzen Trapper: RATING: 6/10

Iron & Wine: RATING 8/10

[Photos Credit: Zach Herrmann]