I was the first girl to drop out of my Girl Scout troop in second grade, which is too bad because I love cookies and I've been told that I look great in green. The last Girl Scout event I participated in was a camping trip into the deep wilderness of New Jersey. We canoed, swam, and engaged in cult-like rituals that involved covering empty coffee cans with felts. After dinner, the scouts would sit around a fire roasting marshmallows, swaying back and forth, singing folk songs in rounds ("Make new friends/ But keep the old/ One is silver and the other's gold") while I threw up behind the cabin.

I remember walking downtown with some friends a couple of years later. For most of us, it was the first time we were allowed into town without parental supervision. It was a pretty big deal, obviously, so it was very important that everything was right. I don't think I have to tell you that I became nauseous and embarrassed when everyone started singing, "Bye bye, Miss American Pie." I felt so dirty and ashamed.

Folk music has been musically and politically vital at more than one point in last century, but for the past few years, it's been badly in need of some innovators. Beck's One Foot in the Grave is six years old now, and for every Lucinda Williams or Gillian Welch, there's a flood of banal, derivative and sickening renaissance-fair folk records which ooze out, uncontained, into the public sphere. Kids are getting hurt.

Two years ago, Sue Garner (of Vietnam, Fish and Roses, and most recently, Run On) released her first solo project, To Run More Smoothly. Her voice carried just enough of an elegant twang to remind you that she was once a Georgian, and it gave the guitar-plucked songs a delicate, aloof sound. Songs like "Rose Colored Glue" clearly invoked the spirit of folk, but it seems careless to call To Run More Smoothly a straight folk album, because of its experimental qualities. It threw in smart, modern lyrics, Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley on drums, sound collages, some dissonance, and a cover of Merle Haggard's "Silver Wings," complete with violins and fuzzed-out bass. I didn't fall in love with the record, but it did leave me anxious to hear what kind of difference two years could make.

On Still, Garner's latest collaboration with husband and Run On bandmate Rick Brown, the folk factor is less pronounced but remains a point of reference. It's further from a rock album than anything Sue and Rick put out with Run On, but it doesn't hide their long histories of working on avant-garde rock projects. "Synthbug," Still's opening track, is an upbeat composition of electronics and percussion, padded by warm, droning keyboards. It features a heavily produced, dense sound that seems to refer directly to Tortoise, but instead of finding closure, the track empties out into "I Like the Name Alice," a stark folk ballad. The transition works so well that I wonder if "Synthbug" was built primarily as a place to drop off from.

"Asphalt Road," the album's singular pop song, is well crafted, but sounds like a Yo La Tengo track that's been drained and sterilized. The slow, thick, almost narcotic "Swimmingly" is more successful, as is "Absorbed," which relies on a similar formula to "Synthbug," but adds vocals, reeds, and a rhythmic, hypnotic grinding. (I mean that literally, as in cement grinding, rather than figuratively, as in grinding on the dance floor-- of course.) And just when I thought it wasn't allowed on this kind of "mature project," Antietam's Tara Key actually rocks out on the album's closing track, "Fussy Fuss." The phrase "fussy fuss hey" is stretched out and sampled into infinity, and incorporates a hook that makes you have to shout "Fus-say-fus-hey" repeatedly until someone slaps you (or you slap yourself).

Sue Garner and Rick Brown are onto something with Still. Certainly, not all of the songs will grab you on the first listen, but I'd sit around any campfire that avant-folkies Sue Garner and Rick Brown were attending. And hey, "Fussy fuss, hey, fussy fuss!"

-Kristin Sage Rockermann