Five hundred years ago, the words “minstrels” and “ministers” referred to the same people, singers and preachers traveling the world to bring news to the people, ministering to their bodies and to their souls. On their new album Angels of Destruction! the modern minstrel/ministers of the folk-punk band Marah undo a few centuries of mischief and mistakes, and squeeze these two words back together in some of the most soulful music you’ll ever hear. Instead of divvying experience into joy and sorrow, or elation and depression, or the physical and spiritual, Marah are all the time molding unlike things together, blowing life into packed-tight balls of clay, undoing the entropy of the universe. In other words trying to deliver the news, Good and good, Bad and bad, about who we are.Like those minister/minstrels, Marah learned by traveling, and then kept on traveling to tell what they learned. In their earlier, critically-acclaimed albums, they picked up clumps of material here and there, banjo lines from the streets of Philadelphia, the drunken patter of the sidewalks of Brooklyn, and the tough wisdom of catfishermen, streetwalking transvestites, and city pigeons. They delivered the news of the world by staring at the world. Instead of bemoaning their own fate, they made themselves into the world. In perhaps their best pre-Angels song, they sang, “My Heart Is the Bums on the Street.”Traveling teaches all kinds of lessons from the mundane (don’t fall asleep in a hotel lobby in Lafayette, Indiana) to the profound. On Angels of Destruction! Marah turned their eyes inward, moving from a Whitmanesque catalogue of the world’s wonders and woes, into a deeper view of the battle within themselves. Instead of chronicling the contents of a throttled river in “It’s Only Money, Tyrone” (a porcelain Jesus, train tracks, a bag of dead kittens), they now chronicle the contents of their own souls in “Coughing Up Blood.” The “cancer,” the “volcanic ash,” the “red hot hail,” and “all that pollutes me” clot them, as they do everyone, but at the same time, there are the “angels of mercy …the children of peace.”Coming “down from the mountains,” Marah feel “an Old Testament aching,” shaking “snakes from my shoes” and “leeches in my hair.” The “something wild, something beautiful” they learned in the wilderness of the world is about traveling itself, about the warfare between Satan and God in their own souls, about the way we are always “searchin’ for our home.”Angels of Destruction! is an album about that search, about the transitory pleasures of finding it (only to lose it again), and the disappointments of failure. In the midst of despair, they find “your laughter is my Jesus,” and move from despair to making love to the world that is “just around the corner! Angels on a passing train.” Always, they are on the verge of taking the “Step into the light!” And yet Marah came out of the wilderness with a sermon about the difficulty of doing just that, with an awareness that they, like the world, are not simple, but are both Heaven and Hell, “cannons and bells,” being “scared” and “blue …but cool.”On Angels of Destruction!Marah are singing about themselves but not for themselves. It’s the right kind of sermon, one that demands an audience response of the type they’ve received in clubs in the United States and around the world. Never closed-off, never self-pitying, it’s an album that opens them up and exposes them, vulnerable and truthful and alive.Along with pairing up heaven and hell, joy and despair, Marah squeeze together all kinds of unlike objects. Fronted by two brothers of unlike temperaments and musical tastes, their music has always broken borders between genres not out of a fey sense of experimentation but an honest, difficult effort to find the best of two distinct sensibilities, punk and folk, introversion and extroversion, contemplation and exaltation. To broaden the band’s sound, they added in not one keyboard player but two, in soulful engineer/multi-instrumentalist/jack-of-all-trades Kirk Henderson and the newest addition, pianist/singer/muse Christine Smith. And to make sure the band didn’t lose any of its rock and roll drive, they again added not one but two members, drummer Dave Petersen and guitarist Adam Garbinski.And the music brings together all the sounds of the street they picked up on their travels, and the bagpipe’s hum, and the sharp, angry throb of punk, and the steady, running pulse of old-fashioned rock and roll guitars to make a music that is not a single thing, not an individual genre or mood or style, but a cobbled-together patchwork of everything they love to play and everything they have listened to and everything they have experienced.Together, this traveling band brings the news to the people, news about the warfare inside the human heart, and about the pleasure and pain of the world, and also about music itself. While genres look backward to define themselves as one thing or another, real musicians look inward. Taking the best of rock and roll, of punk, of soul, of blues, of folk music, of the sounds of the street, they are making a music that includes the best of the American music traditions – the wisdom of generations – but in a way that is never nostalgic or quaint but always alive, on the move, and ready to meet the world.