All by myself, almost: Marah's Dave Bielanko soldiers on with a "folk-trio" version of his band.

Double-aught eight hasn’t been particularly easy on any of us, but Dave Bielanko — frontman of Marah, the Brooklyn-by-way-of-North Philly true believers who were praying at the Stations of The Boss back when The Hold Steady were in, well, Lifter Puller — has had a particularly rough year.

In January, Marah released Angels of Destruction!, their seventh full-length (if you count their rather delightful Christmas album from a few years back, which you should) and announced a U.S. tour with a 9:30 Club date on the itinerary. Given that they hadn’t filled Vienna’s 200-ish capacity Jammin’ Java last year, booking the 9:30 seemed like just one more example of the optimism that's kept the group more or less afloat through a decade-plus of commercial indifference. By early February, the album’s mostly-favorable notices were old news and the tour was off. In a tortured letter on the band’s website last winter, Bielanko wrote of a “mutiny” that resulted in the departure of half the band, leaving only Bielanko, his brother Serge, and pianist/singer Christine Smith, who’d joined the group not long before the others left. Oh, Yoko?

After muddling through some European dates last spring, Bielanko dropped into a months-long depression, eventually pulling himself out of it to work on new music. So said Bielanko his own jangly-nerved self last night, back onstage at Jammin’ Java fronting a guitar (sometimes banjo)-piano (sometimes accordion)-bass (just bass) version of the band he kept referring to as a “folk trio.” Serge, the group’s only other stable member, was off with his wife, expecting a baby imminently, so backing up Bielanko were Smith and bassist Johnny Paisano. (If that’s his real name, for him to get a gig playing bass in Marah is kind of like Barack Obama finding a guy named Justice Everyman to be his Secretary of Labor.)

“I said ‘fuck rock and roll' a long time ago,” Bielanko declared at the top of an agreeably ramshackle two-and-half-hour survey of the group’s deep, and deeply obscure, catalog. And with that, he lit into “Limb”, a “Stairway to Heaven”-length banjo lament about — what else? — a punch-drunk boxer. Bielanko, who looks like a sicklier version of Jack White, coughed and wheezed whenever he stopped singing, and his scratchy vocal sounded more vulnerable than ever. You felt a little guilty looking to a guy who seemed so perenially on the verge of cracking up to entertain you, and yet his palpable anxiety somehow didn’t mar his performance at all.

“You know what really takes the edge off not drinking any more?,” he asked after returning from a brief intermission. “Doing tons of blow backstage!” However he’d gotten there, he did seem a whole lot calmer and more confident. The second set, opening with the urgent gallop of “Wild West Love Song”, was more persuasive and purposeful than the first, and also twice as long. “City of Dreams” was wistful and tender, followed by a cover of “Autumn Leaves” and then a fiery take of “The Catfisherman”, for which Dave warned his two cohorts not to try to sing his absent brother’s harmony parts. “I got this,” he said, which didn’t stop Smith from singing anyway. Paisano pounded his fist on the body of his upright bass, standing in for the absent kick-drum and kick-drummer.

Dave’s jokes about being high, and being broke, and where the people who'd occupied the table nearest the stage for the first set had vanished to for the second, all sound more than a little desperate in the retelling. But they actually made his uplifting, terminally unfashionable songs shine more brightly. Bielanko writes when he’s depressed, but he doesn’t write about being depressed. A new song called (probably) “Junk-Drawer Dream” was a purely escapist thing inspired, he said, by his and Smith’s reclamation of a piano they found in a Brooklyn alley. (Not that this guy would ever likely admit to buying a piano, even if he could afford one.) Minutes before, a story about how his mom had convinced him to use the band’s tour bus to drive college students in central Pennsylvania to the polls on Election Day preceded a medley of “This Town” and the traditional “He’s a Mighty Good Leader”.

The whole thing appeared to be witnessed by fewer than a hundred people, which is a minor travesty, but your loss, Music Lovers! Praising this band in the New York Times in 2004, Nick Hornby wrote, “I don't care whether the music sounds new or old: I just want it to have ambition and exuberance, a lack of self-consciousness, a recognition of the redemptive power of noise, an acknowledgment that emotional intelligence is sometimes best articulated through a great chord change, rather than a furrowed brow."

Only Bielanko himself could say it better, and on one of his loveliest ballads, he does:

“So what if we’re out of tune with the rest of the world.”