Vagabond Opera

Portland, Ore.'s Vagabond Opera can't be called psychedelic, but the cabaret whimsy of Sing for Your Lives! wouldn't have been out of place on the arcane edges of '60s rock. Vagabond Opera isn't a klezmer band, either, yet the mad rhythms and melancholy melodies of Eastern Europe are conjured on almost every other track. Picture Vagabond Opera playing a Hasidic wedding on Haight-Ashbury, complete with accordion and cello along with clarinet, mandolin and a rock rhythm section. A dozen influences are transformed in the white heat of their imagination and endowed with an unpretentious grandeur seldom heard in today's music.