Now here’s what I call freak-folk. Alvarius B., less fancifully known as Alan Bishop of long-running weirdo kings Sun City Girls, snarls and warbles with an inspired dementia that recalls Captain Beefheart in mystical troubadour mode, or maybe Dylan at his most sneering and surrealistic, but there’s really nothing that can compare to his snaggle-toothed, near-Tourettic and thoroughly filthy fingerpicked phantasies. His second self-titled album, originally released as a double LP in 1998 and now reissued on the Girls’ Abduction imprint, finds him scrawling his way across the fretboard on 45 cuts of warped, droney blues such as “Seeing-Eye Latte” and “Sex Cult from the University,” while raving about, for instance, a grandpa who “sucked all of Arabia from a herbivore’s labia.” It sets a pretty definitive upper limit of weirdness for music made by just one guy with an acoustic guitar.
Mon., Sept. 3, 9 p.m., $10, with Mark Feehan, and Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski, Johnny Brenda’s, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.
