Of Monsters and Men would like to invite you to the Polk party, the party with the Polk

Apparently, HBO was auctioning off its wardrobe for "Carnivàle."

I’ve tried to not be a hater. Having kids who love pop radio will do that – you find yourself digging stuff like BOB and Taylor Swift and Neon Trees when you probably would have pooped all over it as a snobbish college newspaper music reviewer.

But sometimes the old venom, that evil juice that once made me rage over Dave Matthews, starts to boil up again. Like when Mumford & Sons played “Saturday Night Live” last year. It’s not horrid, but it’s sneaky and subversive. Yes, these heart-throb Brits play instruments that you don’t typically find on a Billboard hit. But the writing is still typical Billboard fare, albeit weaker than some of the best stuff. Don’t try and sell me bluegrass or even New Grass when it’s really just Katy Perry dressed in old-timey clothes and played with banjos and fiddles instead of heavy synths and guitars.

This old-timey thing is definitely a trend. The next big shit to come out of nowhere was The Lumineers (not the Luminaries), a band of weird looking folk dressed, yet again, like it was the 1840s. Only this time the underlying pop element was replaced with some faux indie-emo thing, complete with yelps designed to sound like a railroad song or “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, only it ends up sounding like a small dog with rabies.

Fact: President James Polk died of diarrhea.

The website Funny Or Die was all over this just last month in a pretty funny "Which Is The Better Band" feature.

Which leads us to Of Monsters and Men which, besides having an insanely bad and pretentious name, represent the worst of the bunch because they unabashedly rip off both in terms of look, feel and sound, complete with the very same clothes from when Polk was president and the very same yelping deployed by the Lumineers.

Please, some one tell me the difference between THIS and THIS.

Again, it’s not that any of the three suck on ice. They all play well, sing well and form a tight unit in a live setting. It’s the obvious factory-like ways of the music industry that’s so annoying. Did the suits encourage Of Monsters and Men to go shopping at a retro mid-1800s store? Where would you even find such a store? What about the hey-ho yelping? There’s no way that’s a coincidence.

Of Monsters and Men will be at Philadelphia’s Festival Pier at Penn’s Landing on June 8. But it might end up being Lumineers or Mumford & Sons. Who will even know the difference?

A Craic with the Saw Doctors at the TLA

Ol' Owen hit the triple crown of badass - diddlin' the boss' wife, diddlin' the boss' help, and punkin' the boss' bro.

If you dork out for HBO shows like I do, you suffered one of those patented holy shit moments when a New York mob faction went all "Seven" on Nucky Thompson right-hand man Owen Sleater toward the tail end of the most recent ah-meah-zing season of "Boardwalk Empire."

Maybe we shoulda saw it coming, but if your first thought was "ah, what's in the box" when Nucky received what looked like the lamp from "A Christmas Story" at 4 a.m. and thought you'd find this inside, then give yourself a prize. Me? Yeah, I was all kinds of torn up for ol' Margaret Schrooooeeder, but I was also so scared of Gyp Rosetti I felt like he was coming after me next.

Nothing soothes the soul of losing one of our own from the Ol Sod like some good old Celtic Rock, and, if it's St. Patrick's Day, anything featuring a dude with an accent and a band boasting fiddle, banjo, accordion, mandolin or any other similar instrument will suffice.

I said kelly green, not ... ah nevermind.

But if you want the top shelf stuff, you reach for The Pogues, Black 47 or the Saw Doctors, who will be at the Theatre of the Living Arts, 334 South St., Philadelphia, on Sunday March 17.

Take some Beatles, add a little Bruce, stuff it with a punk sneer and smother it in kelly green and voilà - you've got stuff like "Never Mind The Strangers," "Ivana in the Brogue," "About You Now" and "I Useta Love Her."

Sunday's show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25. Visit the TLA's website to buy em or for more info.