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.)