Tim Smith, singer and songwriter for Denton, Tex. folkies Midlake keeps the Internet at a distance (that's where the critics are) but he doesn't think it makes him special.

He knows that for every cardigan-sporting Apple fanboy, there's a flannel-draped beardster cultured and affluent enough to adopt minimalism as a hobby.

To wit: Smith barely has a cell phone ("though I can maybe see myself getting an iPhone... one day"), and to this day refuses an e-mail account.

"Yeah, somebody in the band signed me up for my own e-mail as a joke," he said. "I actually got kind of upset about it. I canceled it, but the label sent me all these e-mails like ‘Oh great, we can finally talk to you' and I was just like, no, we can't. I don't want to check that every day."

Midlake & Rogue Wave wsg Peter Wolf Crier Ladies Literary Club, Grand Rapids Sept. 22, 8 p.m. $20 public, $10 with Calvin ID calvin.edu/admin/sao, (616) 526-6282

He swears his quasi-Luddite lifestyle, like his band's straight-from-the-Shire aesthetic and admittedly retro sound (Google automatically fills in "Fleetwood Mac" as a keyword search companion) isn't intended as a social statement or an attempt to turn up its collective nose to flavor-of-the-month indie-rock.

It's just that for every mostly positive review of its spacey Euro-folk meets ‘70s soft-rock, like the A- that the AV Club gave its breakthrough album The Trials of Van Occupanther, there is a mostly depressing review, like the 3.6 (out of 10) Pitchfork gave its latest album The Courage of Others.

"The other guys aren't as affected by that stuff, but I try to steer clear," he said. "It's not that we're out of that [indie-rock blog] scene, either. I mean, we're in it. I would look like a cliché indie-rocker if you saw me walking the street. The hair is getting longer; I've got a beard, plaid shirts. We're not trying to escape that, we just do what we like to do."

What the former North Texas University jazz students like to do, says Smith, is to be completely unoriginal -- and to be honest about it.

"I don't know man, it's tough, but I just feel like everything has pretty much been done and that the canvass is pretty well messed up by this point," he said. "To be original is virtually impossible nowadays. I can't tell bands apart. Everyone sounds the same. I don't fault striving to be original, but it's hard. We don't claim to be original. We just flat out tell people who our influences are and what we love and that we're just trying to make that kind of music to the best of our abilities."

In 2006, the so-old-it's-new hooks of "Roscoe" fit in with enough of what people were into to make it one of that year's most blogged-about songs.

"Yeah, before [The Trials of Van Occupanther] came out some reviewer got a hold of it, and leaked it online," Smith said. "I think it had 80,000 downloads before the album even came out. It didn't make any money. It was passed out for free, I guess. But that was really what did it for us ... that was really huge for us. I'm really thankful for it."

So that's one good thing about the Internet, right?

"Yeah," he says. "I guess."