It’s kind of hard to say what it is,” says one of Vaud and the Villains’ musicians who goes by the name One String, when asked to describe the group in a video interview a few years old. “It’s vaudeville. It’s just this side of theater; it’s Americana.”
The 19-piece group comes to SOhO this Sunday for their first proper, late-night, Santa Barbara gig after having spent the last five years building notoriety in their native Los Angeles. The creation of married couple Andy Carneau and Dawn Lewis, Vaud and the Villains is a dream of a band that might have existed in the 1920s or 1930s, a mix of races and styles, of Dustbowl and traveling medicine show, all acoustic, but loud and raucous as hell, playing the American version of Joe Strummer’s “Three Chords and the Truth.” But a Vaud and the Villains performance is also a show, with a narrator (Mr. Carneau) and characters with fictional backstories, as well as dance routines. (Mr. Carneau is fond of quoting Oscar Wilde to explain the fictional group: “Every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.”)