A somewhat unlikely assemblage of beguiling musicians is clicking on all cylinders these days, riding high in their two complementary musical vehicles, Men of Many Vices, a funk-tinged bluegrass rock amalgam that resists tidy pigeonholing, and Fautlines, a more straight-ahead, high-octane bluegrass outfit whose reverence for both tradition and the avant garde is obvious.

Upright bass player Ryan Deasy, banjo man Toby Oler and fiddler Mike Lindeau form the nucleus of the five-man collective and funnel their disparate musical interests into both bands. Indianapolis-based Nick Mallers lends percussion to Men of Many Vices, and Chris Padgett sporadically plays acoustic guitar for Fautlines since he relocated to North Carolina.

Both groups were hatched in 2006 by Deasy and Oler after their wildly popular band, Riders in Disguise, dismantled.

Prodigious guitarist Padgett and hip-hop and jazz percussionist Mallers came on board later, and Lindeau began burnishing both outfits after that with the mean-clean fiddle playing that once enabled him to snag the Alaskan fiddle championship crown.

The three core members, all of whom live in Bloomington, recently sat down at the rustic southside home Lindeau shares with his partner, Dyanne, for homemade grub, music and shop talk punctuated with frequent knee-slapping horselaughs and tangential meanderings on everything from pop culture to late-night outer space programs on the Discovery Channel.

Though the exuberant, brainy trio shares a passion for bluegrass and music in general, their individual backgrounds are as different as Ralph Stanley on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

Deasy, who grew up in Indianapolis, says he spent most of his youth playing classical music on his upright bass and that it wasn't until college that he became acquainted with the American folk music canon.

"I played classical bass for a long time; classical was just it. Then I got to college and it was Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Charlie Poole and Lead Belly. It took me a long time to even hear Bill Monroe," he admits.

Because he played classical music for so long, the 20-something also says he's more influenced by musicians in his immediate sphere than larger-than-life pioneers from another era.

"I'm more influenced by what Toby does than Earl Scruggs," he said.

Oler had early exposure to bluegrass music in the eighth grade when his grandfather bought him his first Bill Monroe cassette tape, but he did not start playing until five to six years ago as a freshman in college, a remarkable fact given his prowess on the banjo.

"After that first listen," he recalls, "I just started expanding it and listening to more bluegrass. I saw Bela Fleck my freshman year and went and rented a banjo from Smith-Holden for six months and learned how to play."

Lindeau, more than any of the others, has lived the life of the archetypal pickin' and grinnin' bluegrass wanderer of the Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley canon he cut his teeth on. The airtight fiddler with the easy laugh has traveled extensively, moving here a year and a half ago after living off the grid in the Ozarks for 12 years. He has played fiddle for many years and finds special resonance in southern Indiana, as he comes from a long line of old-time and country musicians who've "left an indelible imprint" on the musical landscape in this area for the last 70-plus years.

"I thought Bloomington was a cultural oasis better suited for me," he said. "My cultural heritage is in the region from Champaign-Urbana down through Louisville from approximately 1935 to this day. Three generations of my family are still alive and playing music."

While MOMV and Faultlines ably attack folk standards like "Frankie and Johnny" with propulsive intelligence and deftly executed instrumentals, it's with their growing body of original excursions that both bands really take flight. Though some of Lindeau's previously penned songs occasionally appear in live sets, Deasy and Oler have written the bulk of the bands' original songbook.

Familiar folk music motifs, like love, loss and booze, are tackled with a wisdom that belies the writers' youth and delivered with corrosive wit and an English professor's preoccupation with language.

The two enjoy a symbiotic songwriting partnership, or as Oler puts it, "basically, we fill each others gaps in writing songs, and we play to each other's strengths."

Deasy recalls how one of Faultlines' audience favorites, a clever kiss off-scorcher written by Oler called "The Morning After" was conceived: "We'd played a wedding very late into the night, and we were all pretty worn out. I slept under a sink that night, as I recall it, and we drove all night to get back to Bloomington to play an early morning Farmers' Market gig. We all looked wasted, and Mike walked in and said, 'It's the morning after the night before,' and that became a song."

Though both bands are musicians' musicians above all else, they do enjoy a modest but fervent local following and have been successfully gigging elsewhere, including Louisville, North Carolina, Chicago, Tennessee and last year's Tall Stacks Festival in Cincinnati. All three members, however, point to certain holes in the fabric of the Bloomington music scene, at least insofar as bluegrass is concerned.

Lindeau puts the situation succinctly: "Bluegrass is definitely underground in this town. Underground meaning that it is not being promoted, and musicians are not being paid to play for people to come and listen to."

Deasy gives the relative lack of financial support to the local bluegrass scene a slightly more sanguine twist, however when he observes: "We live in loud times, and it's increasingly harder to find a niche. But I'm not concerned about the life of folk music because there will always be people playing it, and it doesn't need to rise to the media profile of something else."

Perhaps Oler best captures both bands' mantra when asked to describe their sound and wryly deadpans, "Really, we are just come-and-see-us-play grass."

Lori Canada can be reached at locanada30@yahoo.com.

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Men of Many Vices
Faultlines