Accordion Hero controllers won’t ship until next year, but the squeezebox revival is already well under way.

In fact, it’s been going for a while. Geoff Berner, nominal star and arguable founder of the annual Accordion Noir Festival, cites Tom Waits’s 1987 release, Franks Wild Years, as a landmark moment; with Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo contributing norteño melodies, the accordion was undeniably back.

Older listeners might cite Flaco Jiménez’s stint with Ry Cooder’s touring band, or John Kirkpatrick’s with Richard Thompson’s, as equally revelatory. But that’s splitting hairs. Although it’s taken a couple of decades for this news to sink in, it’s clear that the accordion is no longer hopelessly, irretrievably uncool.

“I’d always known of the existence of the accordion,” says Accordion Noir Festival organizer Rowan Lipkovitz, in a telephone interview from his home. “That’s something we all can say. It’s been kind of a forbidden instrument, but it’s not obscure: it’s just that everyone knows that it’s reviled. But now it’s been long enough that we’re forgetting why we’re supposed to hate it so much.”

For the cohost of Co-op Radio’s Accordion Noir show, which airs at 10 p.m. every Wednesday, it was Berner rather than Waits who was the revelation. “I saw him singing his very pointed, very punky, very angry, bitter, and sarcastic songs, and this went against everything that I’d always believed accordion music had to be,” Lipkovitz says, citing Lawrence Welk as the epitome of awful. “Instead, you could write songs about real things, and they didn’t have to be pleasant. Maybe this was an instrument on which serious music was possible.”

There’s no question that Berner, whose recently released Victory Party tackles such heavyweight topics as poverty, war, and the idea that the state of Israel is a lumbering, deadly golem, writes serious songs. But when the Straight reaches him at home, he gives a hilarious account of his own introduction to the instrument.

“I was kind of a punk-rock kid who played the piano, and my guitar-playing friends were going out in front of the liquor store and making money,” he recalls. “I was at a party where they had brought their liquor-store money, and I was angry at them—and drunk—because I couldn’t do what they were doing. So I said, ‘I’ll show you! I’ll play the accordion.’ And then someone who lived at the house was like, ‘Here’s one! My grandfather died and left it to me.’

“You know, it was the ’90s, and it was unfashionable, and nobody wanted them,” Berner continues. “They were just mouldering in attics—these beautiful machines were just lying around and nobody had any use for them. So he just gave it to me. And I started mucking around with it, and I was like, ‘Jeez, this thing was designed to be super easy. Somebody a long time ago was really smart about how they set this thing up. The bass is here, the chords are here, I can solo: this is a better singer-songwriter instrument than the guitar!’ ”

Even more appealing, to the self-described “whiskey rabbi”, was the effect that his accordion-playing had on the unwary.

“The other thing that really excited me was that these regular, normal people hated it,” he explains. “And they didn’t just dislike it, but they felt it was important to their bullshit rock ’n’ roll cool to, like, abhor accordions. And I thought, ‘Wow! This is really punk-rock! I just show up, and regular people, regular Springsteen-fan-type people, run out of the room! This is more subversive than I had thought.’ ”

Unsurprisingly, strong currents of the ironic and the absurd run through the Accordion Noir Festival. Lipkovitz’s band, the Creaking Planks, performs accordion-led versions of Radiohead and Britney Spears songs, while Bay Area import Duckmandu is probably best known for covering the Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables album in its entirety. His solo take on the Cal-punk classic is called Fresh Duck for Rotting Accordionists—and, trust me, “California Uber Alles” has never sounded so good.

And then there’s Barbara Adler’s Fang, quite possibly Vancouver’s only accordion-led power trio. Adler became an accordionist out of necessity, after songwriter Mark Berube quit her other group, the Fugitives, to pursue a solo career—and true love—in Montreal.

“I could play piano a little bit, so it made sense to try to learn it so we didn’t have to try to find another accordion player who could sing high notes,” she explains. Since then, though, she’s developed an interesting symbiosis with the instrument.

“I empathize with a lot about the accordion,” she says. “Accordions are kind of cranky and weird and out of tune and disparaged a lot. But they also kind of always pull through. Most accordions will play even when they’re pretty much completely mangled on the inside, and I really like that.”

Which might just tie in with Lipkovitz’s take on why the accordion is a far superior device than that other instrument du jour, the ukulele.

“The accordion is sturdy,” he says. “It’s built to last. Ukuleles? They’re practically disposable.”

Fang, Geoff Berner, and Maria in the Shower headline the Accordion Noir Festival at the Waldorf Hotel next Friday (September 23). For a complete schedule of other festival events, visit the Squeeze Box Circle website.