The Pocahontas County Opera House Foundation is excited to present a special concert with The Low Anthem, Friday, September 16, at 7:30 p.m.

The Low Anthem appeared this July on National Public Radio’s World Cafe and has been a repeat guest on Mountain Stage.

With a grab-bag of unexpected instrumentation in tow, the band spins a mix of folk, rock and wrenchingly atmospheric ballads.

In December 2009, The Low Anthem hunkered down for a winter of recording in a cavernous, derelict pasta sauce factory in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Ben Knox Miller, with band-mates Jeff Prystowsky, Jocie Adams, and newest member, Mat Davidson, teamed up with engineer Jesse Lauter to construct a studio in the unused space. They played a wide variety of often unusual instruments, combining folk with blues, hymnals, barn-stompers and whispered meditations to create “Smart Flesh,” their third record, released on February 22, 2011 by Nonesuch and Bella Union (UK, Europe).

The Low Anthem originally met and grew to its current lineup in a handful of ways. Miller, of Ossining, New York, and Prystowsky, of New Jersey, became fast friends sharing graveyard-shift duties as DJs at Brown University’s radio station. With a laughably small listenership, their playlists were primarily for one another. The band became serious for these two when—fresh out of school—they teamed up with a gravel-voiced and blues-obsessed Virginian by the name Dan Lefkowitz. The three hatched the beginnings of the band’s sound over nine volatile months together in their Providence apartment, until tensions and divergent interests finally led to Dan’s departure.

Bostonian and former NASA technician Jocie Adams soon stepped into the vacancy, after being asked to play clarinet on the final track for their first album, “What the Crow Brings.” Her fluency with classical composition and arrangement and her intuitive musicality would dramatically expand the band’s horizons. Miller and Prystowsky credit her for being largely responsible for the new sense of harmony featured in the band’s previous album, “Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.” The band first befriended Mat Davidson, of Roanoke, Virginia, in these early days gigging in Boston, and in October of 2009 asked him to come on board. Being a versatile multi-instrumentalist and a pure singer, he was a match for their frenetic instrument swapping and harmonic style.

Exhilarating young troubadour William Elliott Whitmore will open for The Low Anthem’s Opera House performance. On his heralded new album “Field Songs,” Whitmore lends a voice of absolute conviction and compassion to the struggles and perseverance of the American farmer. Still based on the small family farm in Iowa on which he was raised, Whitmore is an artist uniquely suited to capture this profoundly important and seemingly vanishing landscape.