Among the reams of glowing press afforded A. A. Bondy’s “When the Devil’s Loose” upon its release last fall, one fawning bit of prose stands tall. Writing for

www.HearYa.com

, a blogger who scribbles beneath the pen name Oz reveals to the reader that, indeed, “My affection for A. A. Bondy is threatening my heterosexuality.” This is funny, sure, and hyperbolic as all get-out. But there is a kernel of honest revelation lurking beneath the layers of implied, tongue-in-cheek “bromance.”

Indie-rock types have fallen for Bondy, and hard. As is often the case with these sort of affairs, the smitten fan becomes willfully (and gleefully) unable to separate the music from the image of the man making that music. Game, set, match. A. A. Bondy is an in-die- rock superhero. Call him Ziggy Stardust in a flannel shirt and immaculately crafted bed-head.

“He is so underrated that’s it’s mind-boggling,” says Donny Kutzbach of Fun Time Presents, the promoter responsible for bringing Bondy to Mohawk Place for a concert at 8 p.m. Wednesday. “He has one of those voices that is so wistful and so lonely sounding. And he writes these songs that match it so perfectly. As a performer, he captivates with just his guitar and that voice.”

So who exactly is Bondy, and how has he managed to make so many otherwise intelligent rock guys forget about Ryan Adams and Jeff Tweedy in one fell swoop, without putting too much readily apparent effort into it?

Bondy is not some singer/songwriter version of “The Man Who Fell To Earth,” in fact. Far from falling ready-made from the great beyond, he’s been around for a while. The stunning, disturbingly intimate alt-folk of “When the Devil’s Loose” does not represent his first rodeo.

When he was known simply as Scott Bondy, the soon-to-be modern troubadour du jour played guitar and sang with the Alabama band Verbena, a collective that should’ve, could’ve and —in a different music industry climate, probably would’ve— been way bigger than it was. As things turned out, despite the commitment and involvement of producers like Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, et. al.) and Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana)—and even with major releases through the labels Merge and Capitol—Verbena never rose beyond cult success. The group disbanded in 2003, by which time Scott Bondy had already begun his transformation into the A. A. Bondy who would soon be the poster boy for the “new troubadour movement” that rose to prominence by the midpoint of the last decade, and is still going strong today.

In interviews conducted since the launch of his solo career, Bondy has generally shied away from discussing his Verbena days. It’s as if his desire has been to start fresh and to free himself from expectations generated by that band—one which he was not the sole director of, anyway. Hence the name change, perhaps. (The “A. A.” represents his birth name, Auguste Arthur.)

Verbena’s sound was decidedly heavier and thicker than is the more considered and spacious solo work Bondy has crafted in the time since. In fact, one needn’t be a fan of Verbenain order to be susceptible to the solo Bondy’s charm.

“I saw Bondy in concert a few years ago, and instantly became a fan,” recalls Kutzbach. “It was afterward that I found out he had been in Verbena, who I’d admired. His stuff was so different than Verbena, though, so it was easy to see why I didn’t connect it. I got a call about booking him in late 2009, right after ‘When the Devil’s Loose’ came out, and I was just starting to absorb it. Now, I’m convinced that it’s damn close to a masterpiece.”

Indeed. Bondy has described “Devil” as sounding “like a radio washed ashore after a shipwreck,” which is both cryptic and pretty much on the money. There is a world-weariness at the record’s heart, but Bondy always sounds bemused, which may be what elevates the music well above the catacombs of the self-referential, if not the downright solipsistic. Bondy never sounds that way. It’s as if he finds heartbreak and dissolution mildly amusing, even if it has all made him feel like the survivor of a shipwreck.

What Bondy appears to be after throughout “Devil” is some sort of redemption, but like a male lead character in a Cormac McCarthy novel, he seems fully prepared to never be granted as much. The album is the sound of whiskey and cigarettes and dusty roads that lead to nowhere, but it’s also the sound of an auto-didact with a tendency toward the bookish who left home a long while back and, at long last, has finally run out of highway to drive and books to read.

It’s that sense of taking stock of one’s situation with an honest, if somewhat bloodshot, eye—of feeling kinda bad without feeling sorry for yourself—that is quite likely the very factor that has made those with a fondness for the beautiful loser figure in music history fall so hard for Bondy.

“There’s definitely a lot of singer/songwriters treading this territory,” says Kutzbach, in reference to the lonesome cowboy-troubadour Bondy (probably unwittingly) has come to represent.

“It’s a back tobasics, decidedly glancing-at-the-past music — one that is grasping for folky simplicity — and there’s a lot of people doing it at the moment. But I’ll bet most of them wish they could do it as effortlessly and as beautifully as Bondy does.”