POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Aggressive Imagery From Punk-Inspired Roger Manning

They call it anti-folk, a New York sub-genre in which solo acoustic singer-songwriters do something altogether more abrasive than the sounds and images usually associated with the term folk . The punk-inspired attitude doesn’t supplant folk’s idealism, but it does give it a twist, loosens it up, makes it squirm.

It’s not the kind of thing that gets you invited to events like the recent “Troubadours of Folk” festival, and apparently it’s not even the kind of thing that’s penetrated L.A.’s cutting-edge: Roger Manning, the field’s most prominent figure, with a history of albums on such cool labels as SST and Shimmy Disc, found himself at the Genghis Cantina on Monday playing to about the same number of people he’d find on a New York subway car at 3 in the morning.

Manning, who was also scheduled to play the Largo on Tuesday, pummeled his guitar and let fly with torrential imagery that, inevitably, comes down to Dylanesque .

Of course Dylan was a pretty unruly force back in his Village days, and Manning’s aggressive, nasal snarl carries a similar force.

His short set emphasized personal explorations, steering clear of the hardball politics that give his work balance and weight, but he did sing Sonic Youth’s “Youth Against Fascism,” and let fly at right-wing preachers.

Close enough for anti-folk.