Mikey Powers has a folk voice 200 years out of time. Not the cute kind you get from bands who bought a banjo and a flannel shirt and called it Appalachia, but the authentic kind, where you can’t tell if the guy singing is having a religious experience or a stroke, due to the song’s conviction. With a full entourage, Powers leads The Powers Ensemble’s debut Kindling.
The first thing you should know about The Powers Ensemble is that it isn’t a “band” in the way your dad might understand it. It’s whoever’s free: mandolin and double bass one week, flugelhorn and bass clarinet the next. Powers’s label, Baltimore’s Shiny Boy Press, bills itself as a genre-fluid “arts collective // pals,” which is the kind of statement that usually raises…