The Del McCoury Band: It's Just The Night

Just as hippie blues-rockers in the late '60s drafted living R&B legends to share gigs and bestow credibility, so the rootsy jam bands of the early '00s have been associating with bluegrass legend Del McCoury, hoping that some of his authenticity will rub off. McCoury has been taking a little back, too. Ever since its high-profile 1999 collaboration with Steve Earle, McCoury's progressive-minded band has been using the hipster spotlight to demonstrate how old-timey music can remain contemporary. The group's latest, It's Just The Night, wedges breathless instrumental runs between the verses and choruses of straightforward three-minute songs. The album kicks off with a rendition of Richard Thompson's "Dry My Tears And Move On" that links up U.K. hills with U.S. mountains, finding the high and lonesome mood in Thompson's modernist folk. Later, McCoury grabs a song from mainstream country hitmakers Shawn Camp and Billy Burnette ("My Love Will Not Change") and rides its power-hook until he tames it, while the band's take on Tommy Cash's '70s AM chestnut "Let An Old Racehorse Run" makes a retro song even more so, and paradoxically revives its spirit through delicate picking and distant, locomotive fiddle. At times, the genre's demands push the tracks into excessively formal directions, as on the other Thompson cover, "Two-Faced Love," which has its snapshot of reckless passion blurred by the light bluegrass haze. But McCoury recovers, mainly due to his vigorously nasal voice, which gives simple folk songs like "Fire And The Flame" and "Man Can't Live On Bread Alone" the heft and spark of sermons. Even when he and the boys give in to the temptation to vamp busily and indistinctly, a common bluegrass sin, the promise of a swift return to McCoury's commanding vocals makes the frittering easy to bear.