Brooklyn Cowboys

The night at Southpaw is being promoted as the Brooklyn's Finest Festival, but it's pretty much the exact opposite of what you think. There are no showy singers flinging beer around, no stupidly gaudy costumes, no odd time-signature changes, no knob twisting, no garage-rock revivalists, nobody dressed up as an Electroclash whore. Things tonight are much more old-fashioned, much more laid-back. There's surprisingly nobody checking IDs at the door, so you walk right in.

Halfway through their set, headliner Hem ask the club to turn the stage's air conditioning off. It's fucking cold, you see, and Steve Curtis, the lanky guitarist who's been sitting down and strumming with a pained look on his face for 20 minutes, assures whoever is controlling the temperature that the band won't be bouncing around onstage.

That's an understatement. There are seven people performing as Hem tonight (there are four primary members of the band and many more who play on their album, Rabbit Songs), but there's really nobody to watch. Yeah, there's a dude with a mustache and cowboy hat who's chewing a toothpick and playing mandolin. And there's this pretty brunette with pigtails and lots of eye makeup playing upright bass behind him. But all the members of Hem are barely moving and seem oddly distant from the crowd and even the rest of the band. Most of them are sitting down, including the cowboy-hat guy, Gary Maurer.

They're all here to play the music they care about so very much, the sweet, sad countrified songs that have consumed their lives and wiped out their bank accounts. But they don't seem to be here to put on a show.

There are around 200 people in the club, and half of them aren't really listening to Hem. Instead, the Park Slope hotties are leaning into one another provocatively and whispering into one another's ears and sometimes rudely yelling. They are enjoying the cheap drinks (somehow, a seltzer and a strong rum and Coke cost $4 combined) and trying to find somebody to go home with or least smooch on, and they could give a fuck about the band.

This, bizarrely, is an ideal situation for Hem, because their songs, about drinking and making out and dancing nice and slow, are really perfect background music for such a scene. It's dive-bar jukebox music, songs for when you're drunk and lonely, and it's freezing outside, and you're not sure whether you should stay a little longer or just leave alone.

The night is a homecoming for Hem, who have gotten back from separate tours with Beth Orton and in England. Hem are pretty huge in the UK right now, largely because they're what foreigners imagine an All-American, state fair-and-apple pie band sounds like. Never mind that the bands who actually play before the pig races and the funnel cake-eating contests and the Texas-Oklahoma game don't quite have this level of musicianship. The Irish Times raves about Hem: "The likelihood of a better dreamy pop/folk record released this year is extremely slim? In genre-specific terms, it's folksy alt.Americana. In general terms, it's just brilliant music." Numerous other UK rags have heaped on similar America-friendly praise. Time Out London: "Fragile pastoral Americana." Q: "surprisingly authentic...taps perfectly into America's folk heritage."

This is exactly the type of shit that will limit Hem's popularity in Brooklyn. They are in many ways the simplest decent band in New York City. This is not a criticism. They write straightforward verse-chorus-verse songs, and it's too bad that songcraft almost seems to be a bane in this current local non-scene. Hem's website brags: "No samples, no synths, no Pro-Tools mixing and no digital studio wizardry were employed."

Not that this kind of endeavor is cheap. Recording Rabbit Songs (Bar/None) with an 18-piece orchestra was, the band says, a labor of love, a wallet-emptying experience. Given the seeming disinterest of much of tonight's crowd at Southpaw, this may seem like time and money wasted. But when you look onstage and see band members looking forlorn or almost totally spaced out, you realize that Hem have created something more. This is music as escapism, a personal refuge, a haven away from whatever they may hate about the city or their lives. So they play their songs and they play something Johnny Cash did. They do "Tennessee Waltz" and a Springsteen song.

You would think that performing on a chilly night in front of this kind of crowd would be one hell of a comedown after recently being a media favorite that played Queen Elizabeth Hall, but Hem seem to be too lost in their non-revelry to care. They're onstage together, but each almost seems to be playing for himself or herself. Unlike their pals in the Mendoza Line, who were on earlier (and who they sometimes share a member with), Hem is not a drunken family-reunion mess when they perform. They do not look like people who would pal around or even share a meal together, although they do complain about the obscene amounts of meat they had to consume in England. They look like seven almost-strangers, sad and sober and somber, and somehow all the better for it.

At Hem's best moments, when they kick it up a little into a song that's still not quite fast, when the mandolin and Catherine Popper's upright bass and Hem mastermind Dan Messe's piano and Sally Ellyson's wispy voice intersect beautifully?during these moments, you really do feel like you're somewhere, anywhere but New York. This sounds like a band that practices in a barn instead of a garage, the kind of band that would play at the smokehouse after your high-school football team wins a big game. They are a band you can insert easily into your rural memories or, more likely, your rural fantasies.

But then, like all moments here, the moment is gone, and you realize where you actually are. It's cold and dirty outside, and some stranger is whispering something in your ear. Feeling their breath makes you tingle and cringe at the same time. You smile as best you can and buy another drink. Or just grab your loved one and head home.