Daytrotter.com's latest Barnstormer tour - five nights of live music in Midwestern barns - closes Saturday at the Codfish Hollow barn in Makoqueta. The Reader published an interview with headliner Sondre Lerche in 2009 (RCReader.com/y/lerche), but we wanted to acquaint our readers with a couple of the other bands on this year's tour: Guards and the Romany Rye. (The bill also includes Keegan DeWitt, ARMS, Mike & the Moonpies, and Hands.)

Guards: A Series of Fortunate Events

Richie James Follin said that the ongoing joke of his current band is that as long as a song has a Omnichord - an electronic instrument that was meant to mimic an autoharp - and a 12-string electric guitar, it's a Guards song, regardless of genre or any other consideration.

So Guards' seven-inch of covers includes a startlingly sleepy and longing inversion of Metallica's "Motorbreath" alongside transformed tracks from M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend. There's a dreamy, retro haze over everything, but on that and the earlier collection of seven songs that Follin posted on Guards' Bandcamp site (Guards.Bandcamp.com), the vibe ranges from dark, propulsive pop to angular, doom-filled rock. (Both sets of recordings can be downloaded for free.)

If the husband-and-wife duo of Tennis disappears a year from now, it will remain a great story. Frugal living and romance led to a sailing trip that led to the band that captured their journey in evocative, lovely lo-fi songs. Another period of frugal living will let Tennis test the musical waters over the next year, and if it doesn't work out, Patrick Riley said he's okay with that.

In a phone interview last month, Riley said he and his wife have saved enough money at their day jobs over the past year to "buy ourselves another year of doing whatever. Since music has taken off, we're just going to try the music thing for a year. ... If we can sustain ourselves, we'll keep doing it. If we can't, we'll just turn it back into a hobby again."

The California-based band Dawes has parlayed its debut album, last fall's North Hills, into slots at this year's Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza festivals, and if you've heard the sensitive and often lovely record, you know that's probably not an easy transition.

The group's warm, nakedly emotional songs recall the 1960s and '70s -- aggressively, one could say, if aggression weren't so antithetical to them; they seem built for intimate venues. AbsolutePunk.net wrote that the album is "a collection of 11 near-flawless roots-rock offerings that drip with such a defined sense of soul, grit, and harmony [that] it feels nearly criminal to label this album contemporary." Rolling Stone named the album's "That Western Skyline" one of the 25 best songs of 2009.

Guitarist, lead vocalist, and songwriter Taylor Goldsmith is only in his mid-20s, but North Hills is full of musical maturity, patience, and confidence -- a willingness to let the work overshadow the performers.

On the day he's playing a Daytrotter.com show at RIBCO, singer/songwriter Dale Watson will release Carryin' on, and the album seems a natural fit for a guy who's been a country-music relic from the beginning. That's a compliment, by the way.

Since his 1995 debut Cheatin' Heart Attack, Watson has been writing and performing country songs in a style out of fashion for decades. But it wasn't until this new album that he was able to combine his own songs with musicians from the era he emulates.

His band for Carryin' on was assembled by steel guitarist Lloyd Green and included Hargus "Pig" Robbins on piano and Pete Wade on guitar -- all noted session players active in the 1960s and beyond.

While Watson's regular band -- with which he'll be performing in Rock Island -- is adept at old-school country, the 47-year-old said in a recent phone interview that people his age and younger simply can't beat the old-timers: "It's just something you have to have lived to play."