No more mints on hotel pillows or shacking up on the dirty floors of newfound fans.

For a pair of East Coast bands, one old and one new, three days from now, Crowbar, 420 E. College Ave., is the last stop of the tour. Philly-bred, self-described "folk-punk" act Marah and New York City's indie-rock wisenheimers Sam Champion will both take the stage for a rare Sunday night show.

Sam Champion, whose guitars and vocals have garnered the band comparisons to Pavement and Low, is touring behind the band's debut LP, Slow Rewind.

As singer and songwriter Noah Chernin said, the relatively new band's just trying to create some tunes they'd enjoy even if they hadn't made them.

"Really, we're just making music that's enjoyable for us to listen to in the playback, something that we'd like to hear," Chernin said. "We're all fans of guitar rock -- you know, Crazy Horse, Dinosaur Jr. -- but we try to take aspects of melody and weave them into that Crazy Horse backbeat, or that Velvet Underground chug."

Sam Champion's music speaks strongly to an impoverished, driftless feeling common to a lot of folks in their mid-20s. As Chernin said, that's just experience talking.

"That's where I was at when I wrote those songs," Chernin said. "But those are just themes in rock music; songs about girls, feeling alienated, drinking."

Has much changed since the band started making records and touring the country?

"It's pretty much the same," Chernin said. "I still have no money, still feel alienated. But I'm in a relationship now, so I'm not as lonely, you could say."

Greg Gabbard, owner of City Lights Records, 316 E. College Ave., said that he's been giving Slow Rewind frequent spins in the store.

"I've been playing that record quite a bit," Gabbard said. "They're kind of being touted as the new Pavement, but I think they're really doing their own thing."

Though he promises a rambunctious show on Sunday, Chernin said he and the rest of Sam Champion have their minds set on getting back to the city that never sleeps and squeezing in a good nap.

"When we get back, we'll have done five weeks out on the road," Chernin said. "We're getting a nice groove out here, but I miss being home. Sleeping in my own bed, taking a shower -- those things you never think about."

Dave Bielanko, singer and guitarist for Marah, is no stranger to the perils of the road, but he's convinced it's got its benefits, too. Bielanko said nothing works better than a long tour for getting band members to really read each other onstage.

"For sure," Bielanko said. "Last night we played for two-and-a-half hours. It gets to be a lot more fun after a while. It usually takes a week, but once we're there, it's great. And by the time we hit Europe, we should be firing on all engines."

That's right; Marah will be flying the friendly skies toward merry old England a mere five days after their U.S.-tour-capping State College gig. And Marah's boundless energy doesn't stop with touring; the band has released two full-length albums this year, the highly acclaimed If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry and the festive A Christmas Kind of Town. Bielanko said pounding out two records in a year gave at least one of them, If You Didn't Laugh, a very fierce edge.

"It's really raw," Bielanko said. "I just wanted it to have as much emotional impact as possible. All those songs were written really quickly to be a record, and I think that shows. Our job was to give people something awesome and honest, and I feel like we did that."

A Christmas Kind of Town owes its sound to the Marah aesthetic: Do it quickly, and do it right. Bielanko said the album came together almost by accident.

"We literally had a two-week window to make it," Bielanko said. "But because we're fanatical about the music, we kind of took it as a challenge and put it out there. The music's cooler than cool, so we had to do it."

As music aficionado Gabbard said, Marah's albums are just a preview for their concerts.

"I have a couple of their records, and I think they're good," Gabbard said. "But it's the live thing that people go crazy for."

And there's just no rest for the folk-punks as Bielanko predicts 2006 to be just as hectic for Marah as 2005 proved to be.

"We're actually talking about recording in January," Bielanko said. "We're in a weird spot because we've got a this really good reputation as a live band and some amount of what I'd call critical acclaim, but we're not quite at the level of being a band everybody knows about yet."