A few Rotunda devotees milled on the stairs outside the venue with Aimee Wilson and Porchfront Factorye, the headlining band of the night, for an audience to arrive. Having lost Timbre, the opening act, to illness, Wilson and her band were out on a limb. But the Rotunda always draws its own, modest crowd (the mostly free programming at the University of Pennsylvania's alternative venue presents some of the best emerging, local and national fringe artists) and eventually a satisfactory audience trickled in. Nevertheless, it was surprising to see how unknown Aimee Wilson and Porchfront Factorye remain, even here in their hometown.

A truly roguish looking band of crusty punks, stamped with facial tatts, piercings and decked in vaudeville-tinged gypsy garb, Porchfront Factorye approach a slightly Irish flavored brand of folk with a progressive, eccentric flare. It is irregular music that unravels the tightness of folk structure into a lone, wispy strand. Reminiscent now and then of Mogwai or God Speed You Black Emperor, in terms of dense melodrama and prolonged, unresolved musical tangents, it also touches on the spaced falsetto explorations of a younger Will Oldham. All this in the stiff parameters of a guitar, pedal steel, banjo, didgeridoo, accordion (occasionally two accordions at once) and a hurdy gurdy, also known as a 'wheel fiddle,' a mechanical violin that is cranked rather than bowed.

In the less than ideal circumstances of the night, Aimee Wilson and Porchfront Factorye maintained an arresting resoluteness, throwing themselves wholly into their performance. Wilson's commitment to her singing shivered in her every tendon, her voice expansive and round, alternating between warm, embracing vibrato and shear, chilly sustain. The band as well put on a soulful performance, composed and somber, but not without brief levity (for instance their excellent version of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wanderer").

Aimee Wilson and Porchfront Factorye still have a ways to go. They have a great presence on stage, creative orchestration and arrangement, and a good musical direction. Yet, too often the music fell just short of engaging, a bit flat, or came off as self-absorbed. A few more upbeat numbers would have done a world of good; even the most dirge-obsessed musicophile needs a bit of variation. At the close of their act they drew a couple more poppy, faster tunes from their back catalogue. These songs opened up a new, unrepresented pole in the band's range. If they didn't exactly fit with the rest of the set, and were perhaps too sugary, it wasn't a bad thing.