Ted Leo @ 9:30 Club

The energy and precision of Leo's band is striking, particularly considering that longtime bassist Dave Lerner left the group just a few months ago, and his replacement for the tour, Marty "Violence" Key, is still learning the material. It's also great to see James Canty back in the Pharmacist fold. While the group was great as a lean and muscular power trio, Canty's second guitar adds an extra layer of sound that I'd missed over the past few years of seeing them. After touring for much of the year for Leo's last record, Living with the Living, the musicians have a near telepathic thread running between each other and in and out of the set. Many songs didn't so much as stop or start, but just barreled headlong one into another. Before you realized one song was done, the next would be four measures in and running right over you. Applause is a luxury that Leo can, apparently, live without.

After a half hour or so of pretty much non-stop playing, the group finally took a deep cleansing breath and Leo declared, with a note of apology in his voice, that he might have tired himself out too much at Friday night's show. You could have fooled us. Leo sometimes gets the now often-overused James Brown tag, "hardest working man in show business," but it's not just because of his relentless touring. Every show seems to be a personal test of his own limits. A year and a half ago at the Black Cat, recently recovered from strain on his vocal chords, he was obviously still not fully recovered, yet was still trying to hit those high notes with a vigor that would be disturbing were it not so inspiring. And so it was on Saturday as every song was played as if it might be his last. The setlist hit most of his career, and his catalog is strong enough that he can cherry pick from wherever he likes without disappointing.

And, he had a few surprises up his sleeve as well. As "Little Dawn" drew to a close, with the repeated refrain of "It's alright, it's alright," suddenly the song morphed effortlessly into Daft Punk's "One More Time (Celebrate)" before returning to its source. Later in the set, he put the brakes on for possibly the evening's only relatively laid-back number, the surprisingly straightforward reggae of Living for the Living's "The Unwanted Things", and then ripped into a straight-up hardcore Government Issue cover that reminded the crowd even more directly than "Bomb. Repeat. Bomb." of Leo's strong ties to D.C. punk.

As the show drew to its crashing close with "C.I.A.", with Leo careening wildly around stage, his guitar came off of his neck (whether by accident or design, I couldn't tell from my vantage point), strings popped, and the band, looking spent, left the stage. The singer thanked the audience, glanced at his wounded instrument and declared, "I guess that's it," and walked off. After a few minutes, they returned, and launched into a particularly rage-fueled "The Ballad of the Sin Eater", with Leo running around even more manically than before now that he was without a guitar. This time, after leaving the stage, the house lights came up and music came over the P.A., but the irrepressible crowd was having none of that. A continued chant of "ONE MORE SONG" brought about that most rare of concert events: the unplanned encore. A clearly surprised (and exhausted) Leo came back out once more, alone, declared the audience crazy, and tried to think of a song he could do a capella (why he couldn't use James Canty's guitar is still a mystery). Finally, he wandered over and picked up the bass and started into a cover of Ewan McColl's standard, "Dirty Old Town". A verse in, he decided it worked better a capella and that was how the evening (and the tour) ended, with just Ted's voice and this simple bit of Irish-tinged folk washing over those who remained.