Concert Previews

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band embraced country neo-traditionalism before folks even knew what the term meant, collaborating with famed pickers like Roy Acuff and Mother Maybelle Carter on their 1972 triple album,

Will the Circle Be Unbroken

. The musically flexible Americana quartet also hit the Top 10 a couple of times - on both the pop and country charts - and their still-endearing 1970 cover of Jerry Jeff Walker's "Mr. Bojangles" earned a deserved spot in the Grammy Hall of Fame last year. Formed in California in 1966 by singer/guitarist Jeff Hanna and drummer Jimmie McFadden, this onetime hippie jug band is rounded out by keyboardist Bob Carpenter and multi-instrumentalist John McEuen, who's come and gone a few times since the early years. Onstage, you can expect a mix of old and new, with some tracks from the Dirt Band's 2009 live-in-the-studio effort,

Speed of Life,

which included topflight covers of Canned Heat's "Going Up the Country" and Stealers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle."

- Nicole Pensiero

Minneapolis' Tapes 'N Tapes drafted Dave Fridmann to produce their sophomore album,

Walk It Off

, but it was an awkward fit. Fridmann worked marvels with Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and others, but his expansive orchestral bent felt uncomfortable glossing Tapes 'N Tapes' Pixies-like hard angles. The new self-produced, self-released

Outside

is more direct and immediate, more akin to

The Loon

, their well-received debut. It can risk pastiche: It's easy to triangulate among Modest Mouse, Kings of Leon, and the Walkmen for these songs. But still, the hard-strumming "Freak Out" and the sauntering-then-strutting "SWM" use their influences to good effect, and they should be even better live. Oberhofer, who opens for T'NT Saturday, is definitely worth checking out for raucous, infectious lo-fi kicks.

- Steve Klinge

As far as modern neo-folk goes, Tania Alexandra is a mess. That's a compliment. The wry complexity she offers as a vocalist and composer has often landed the Philadelphian folkie in odd, rocky waters on her private batch of CDs - 2009's

Abnormal,

2006's

Chrysalis

, and 2003's

Emergence.

So much goes on within songs such as "I Could Have Flown" and "Boys to California." A hard nut to crack, Alexandra offers occasional animalistic rhythms, dissonant melodies, and ruminative lyrics that make more sense when you derive that her inspirations are Coltrane, Waits, and Joni Mitchell, and that there's as much cranky jazz and mirthful theater song stuck deep within her merry soul as there is the ache of the quintessentially folksy songwriter. Yet, there's not a sense of pastiche or copy-cat-ism in her work in which to confine her or the subtle grades of shade or tone characteristic of Alexandra's singing voice.

- A.D. Amorosi