Jolie Holland + Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside @ Cabaret Mile End

In the music world, consistency's a bitch. Sure, it helps you build a solid fan base and stack up a repertoire of tunes, but no one wants to write about how your ninth album is just as solid as the eight that preceded it. Such is the curse of many career singer-songwriters, including Jolie Holland, formerly of the Be Good Tanyas, who released her fifth solo album Pint of Blood just last week to unanimously polite reviews.

Speaking of polite receptions, 100 or so faithful gathered at the Cabaret Mile End, an odd venue with a flat, rectangular shape and loads of seating, to catch Holland and her band rather than opting for the 80,000-strong U2 cluster-happening somewhere out east. First up, though, were Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside, a blues-folk group with a slightly cabaret-leaning stage presence thanks to the powerful, if somewhat mannered, lead vocal stylings of Ms. Ford. Their 40-minute set opened with a handful of more downcast tunes, occasionally making use of bowed stand-up bass, but never sunk to becoming actually depressing. Midway through, upon noticing the tenor of their set, they kicked it up a notch, upping the tempo and leaning harder on ace guitarist Jeff Munger's blues solos.

Holland kept Munger and Sound Outside drummer Ford Tennis for her own band, who opened the show with a rousing Michael Hurley cover before getting to Holland's own tunes, beginning with the Pint opener and Neil Young sound-alike, "All Those Girls." Holland's playing style relies heavily on stage banter, albeit of an unusually candid nature. A cover will usually be accompanied by a brief ramble on her feelings for the originator (Hurley, Neil Young, Los Lobos), but the rest of the time she's apt to reel off any stray thoughts as she pieces her set list together. Her use of the band was odd, too: she brought them on for the first few tunes, then discarded two players, then played the entire middle to end of her principal set solo. This unadorned portion worked especially well for lyric-driven tunes like The Living and the Dead's touching, sardonic "Palmyra." Luckily she had the good sense to bring the band back for a spirited take on Pint of Blood's African highlife inspired "Little Birds." ("I wrote this a while ago, but now that I live in Brooklyn...I have a band that can play this.") Munger also ably kept up with Marc Ribot's part on the tricky, ambling ballad "The Devil's Sake."

The encore was admirably loose, with Holland playing the last of her remembered originals before branching out into some more covers, including one last tune that, despite the intervention of her intrepid violinist, she could not properly recall the second half of, ending the show rather abruptly and letting the audience go to discover the horrors of the outside world's sudden, torrential downpour. It was the sort of set-ending the term "grace note" was invented for.

-Simon H hosts Sucker Blues on Wednesdays from 4-5pm