The common thread between the countryish bands on Chicago’s Bloodshot Records is a class consciousness. Few songs have been so overt as the Waco Brothers’ “Plenty Tough and Union Made;” more commonly, they depict people whose lives have been put under pressure or marginalized by economic forces outside their control. Fortunately, few records on the label sound as dry and academic as that description. Instead, the best sound like The Blacks’ Just Like Mom, which shows a boozy, artful hand at every turn.

Musically, the Blacks have grown away from their Bloodshot breathren because country has become just one more style in their arsenal, and on an intelligently-arranged version of Tom Waits’ “Goin’ Out West,” they out-and-out rock. More than anything else though, Just Like Mom sounds like new songs for Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection from 1952 of rural songs of human evil. Like the performances Smith found, the songs here are attractive, and are not doomy or buried under layers of deep portent. In fact, like the cutting of the ear in Pulp Fiction, the violence is kept just off camera; you know it’s there, but not “seeing” it doesn’t diminish its effect. In “Fake Out Jesus,” all you¹re sure of is that a couple got away with with “the loot” and that “she can fake out Jesus.” How they got it is unclear, and the inevitable betrayal by someone that skilled at deception doesn’t need to be shown.

Perhaps the best way to understand Just Like Mom is that despite the similarity of subject matter, it is the opposite of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. Where he sings folk songs like ponderous body counts, the Blacks tell darkly humorous stories with a touch light enough to be fun.