The Brother Brothers, as they typically do, ended their 80-minute show at Columbus, Ohio’s, King Arts Complex with Peter Rowan’s Angel Island and sung of “one more lifetime loving you.”

It was an uplifting moment from David Moss and his identical twin, Adam, who more typically sing dour refrains, such as that on “Colorado,” on which the former played a semi-acoustic guitar and the latter played fiddle.

“Boy, you’re gonna break her heart,” they sung in the kind of close harmonies that’re made possible only through DNA that is the same in both sets of vocal cords.

It was a snowy Jan. 10 in when the Mosses gifted their audience not only with an apropos song of “Colorado,” but with numbers referring to their birthplace on “Illinois River Song;” their band’s Brooklyn origins on “Frankie;” the Texas frontier on “Lonesome;” and West Virginia on “Morgantown.” The musical map-hopping caused Adam to crack about NYC: “As beautiful as the Grand Canyon except opposite.”

Watching the Brother Brothers from the audience is like watching a split screen from the couch. Adam in white, on fiddle on guitar, his brown beard slightly less manicured than his brother’s. David is in blue, on the guitar he and Adam passed back and forth, and cello. 

Witty between songs and (mostly) downcast within them, the Brother Brothers are harmony-rich and overflowing with melody. Think the Milk Carton Kids with classical-and-bluegrass leanings, a blood-kin version of Simon & Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers in the context of 21st-century folk and Americana. 

The duo were at their most innovative on “I Will.” Performed without bows on strummed violin and plucked cello, the song was transplanted from “the White Album” to the covered-in-white Midwest, resulting in the rare Beatles redo that matched – in some ways exceeded – the original for musical ingenuity and sublime vocal clarity. 

The offerings were culled from a master list of songs spanning 2018’s Some People I Know (“Red and Gold”); 2021’s Calla Lily (the Brothers’ original “On the Road Again”); ’22’s Cover to Cover (James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes”); and the January Album, released in April 2024. 

The hopping fiddle-cello bluegrass of “Brown Dog” represented the latter. It’s rare whimsical Brother Brothers song about David’s pandemic-era canine acquisition that almost broke up the band, Adam said, because David named her Yoko. 

The on-the-fly nature of the proceedings – the Mosses could be heard discussing songs off-mic – led to a couple of false starts and missed cues. These only made the performance more authentic – a genuine one-time-only event for the Brothers’ first appearance at Columbus’ long-running Six String Concerts series. 

It won’t be their last.