Last week was one endless bender of big, loud rock. There was Andrew W. K. on Tuesday (who was out signing autographs into the wee hours after the show), Queens of the Stone Age with both Dave Grohl and Mark Lanegan on Thursday, Chicago's Milemarker at the Graceland prom on Friday (more arty than heavy, but excellent just the same), and the Blood Brothers and Botch bringing down the Showbox (and an entire floor of the Camlin Hotel after the show) on Saturday. On Sunday, though, the scene at the Hopvine was the exact opposite of what had been pounding through Seattle all week, as James Scott Peters took the stage with an acoustic guitar at the Capitol Hill pub that hosts live (mostly acoustic) music pretty much every night of the week.

Peters was an animated performer, both in his between-song stories of slicing his finger open and losing a good pot of goose chili, and in the grimaced expressions that scrunched up his face as he sang. His songs told dark stories of running away to Mexico and drinking away lost relationships, mixed with cowboy tales about horses, all delivered with a sarcasm that our photographer, Victoria, said reminded her of Giant Sand frontman Howie Gelb. Peters let his voice travel all over the map, sometimes pushing it down to Johnny Cash depths and other times hamming it up into Muppet-like dramatics, adding little yelps when the songs got a little more country. His best songs were the ones where he simply draped his voice naturally over the chords he played, as he did on one especially somber piece where half the lyrics were in Spanish.

Watching Peters perform was like sitting at some campfire before a roughened storyteller who's passing along his troubles through melodious country folk. It was no big loud rock, but Peters' songs carried with them a heavy intensity just the same.