Austin’s the Gourds have always occupied the vast middle ground between Los Lobos’ broad Americana and the sing-along self-loathing of your typical goodtime frat-rockers. Sort of The (Jam) Band, if you will. So it’s hard to accuse them of getting too serious on this, their ninth studio album. The gorgeously painful “Promenade” sighs with the stately lost dignity of Rick Danko’s best moments, and the back porch shrug of “Moon Gone Down” seeds its alt.country landscape with some refreshing old-timey flourishes. So if the Cajun two-step “Cranky Mulatto” seems a bit shallow, and “Kicks in the Sun” sounds like R.E.M. just before it became ubiquitous, that’s only by comparison.

What the fans refer to as “Gourds Music” is a series of thumbtacks marking locations all over the back country of the U.S. musical map—one earlier release, tellingly, was titled Cow Fish Fowl or Pig—but upping the emotional level of what is basically a smart party band couldn’t possibly hurt their bid for immortality. Tracks such as “Steeple Full of Swallows” (The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” meets the Screaming Trees’ “Dollar Bill”) and the closing “Spivey” (Muddy Waters trying his hand at Jody Reynolds’ “Endless Sleep”) tie up the ends of our country’s musical history so neatly they almost swing the emotional weight of a Ken Burns documentary. The result is as timeless as a covered bridge—and, if you take the time to really observe it, just as evocative.