Langhorne Slim & Heartless Bastards – Live at the Duck Room, St. Louis, Sept. 30

For a Tuesday night, the Duck Room was bustling. As I walked down the stairs a little after 9:00 p.m., the place was already packed with happy, drinking fans who were all smiling up at the long, tall Langhorne Slim.

Slim, in his tight gray floodpants, black boots, and porkpie hat, looked like he had hopped off a train cart filled with hobos to get to this show. But while there seem to be a lot of alt-folk rock acts out there today aching to perfect the outward persona of the Dust Bowl refugee with a busker’s ingenue, Slim actually has the songs and the showmanship to pull it off without reducing himself to mere novelty.

I entered mid-song, just Langhorne alone with his six-string, but it wasn’t long before he brought out his backing band the War Eagles, consisting of drummer Malachi DeLorenzo and upright bassist Paul Defiglia (whose names he never tired of repeating to the crowd). DeLorenzo, the son of Violent Femmes’ drummer Victor DeLorenzo, kicked and shuffled through some mighty impressive drum fills on his stripped-down set, while Defiglia plunked through a number of upright bass solos that reminded me of Femmes’ bassist Brian Ritchie.

But Slim is no Gordon Gano — he’s carefree and cavalier, not angsty and insecure, and if he sings about occasional heartache, it’s not filled with regret and anger. Slim bounded through all his songs, managing to hit all the high notes while wiggling his hips, shaking his boots, and lunging from side to side.

The crowd, meanwhile, was eating it up. Beatle Bob darted to the front to partake in his dip-dap-dancing that he does so well, and I’m pretty sure I saw Pokey LaFarge in the back studying his competition.

The set was mostly upbeat, like the raucous “Rebel Side of Heaven,” but it was the tender “Colette” near the end of the set that got the biggest cheers.

The Heartless Bastards were next. The last time I saw them they were playing a free show on a makeshift stage steps away from my old apartment in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati, to the delight of local hipsters and homeless alike. Since then a lot has changed: lead rocker woman Erika Wennerstrom relocated to Austin following her split with Mike Lamping, and the old Lamping/Kevin Vaughn rhythm section has been replaced with Jesse Ebaugh, the bassist for Pearlene, and Dave Colvin, the ex-Shesus drummer, both of whom appeared on the original Bastards’ demo. And, apparently, they’ve garnered quite the following.

It’s strange to see an old hometown band play in another town, because when the setting and crowd is all local there’s no real way to tell how well the band is actually doing. To see a sizable turnout on a Tuesday night for a road show, where half the crowd is singing along to the words, was pretty damn impressive.

I was afraid that the Bastards’ slow, deliberate rock and roll was going to drag on the energy created by Langhorne Slim, but the opposite was true: people were really getting into it. When Wennerstrom started the riff to “Searching for the Ghost,” there was a pair of androgynous emo kids dosey-doing to my left; Beatle Bob was making air love to the monitor directly in front of me; and to my right, a woman in lumberjack flannel and a mini-skirt nearly broke my foot when she decided to do the twist in her thigh-high boots right on my big toe.

The dancing was also a bit unexpected, because the Bastards’ music seems better suited for lumbering, slow-motion head-banging (of which there was plenty to go around). Like electric blues rock demigods Led Zeppelin before them, the Heartless Bastards manage to achieve total rock heaviosity not by playing louder and faster than other bands, but by remaining in complete control of all the dynamic shifts in their music. The new Colvin/Ebaugh rhythm section were in total lockstep, and the new material from The Mountain, due in January, sounded exceptionally polished.

Wennerstrom, slinging her hollow-body Gibson, absolutely stole the show. With one of the most distinctive and powerful voices in rock and roll today and a wildly avid fanbase, I can only imagine the size of the venues they’ll be playing in a year from now.