Railroad Earth
Album: Last Of The Outlaws
Label: Black Bear
Tracks: 15
Website: http://www.railroadearth.com

I first encountered New-Jersey-based six-piece outfit Railroad Earth around a decade ago, and followed the band's progress intermittently over a few years without getting too excited about their competent, if slightly idiosyncratic blend of rootsy contemporary bluegrass, country and folk with touches of Celtic, eastern, pop and rock thrown in, my feeling being that at that time they lacked a certain sense of overall musical direction. Much like some of the 70s left-field west-coast or Nashville acts on whom they may well have been modelled, consciously or not.

Here, on their seventh album, there's still a kind of leftover ambience from that era, a kind of looseness, a lazy devil-may-care attitude that gives the band licence to kick conventions around just how they please while still staying true to their roots. I rather like this, and I certainly find this latest offering, which it seems has been three long years in the making, a far more intriguing and long-term satisfying-cum-challenging prospect.

Frontman Todd Sheaffer is still very much at the helm, and still writing all the material, but the band feel of the arrangements is both very much present and a distinctive element of the presentation. I might at times be tempted to compare Railroad Earth to the Dead circa Wake Of The Flood perhaps, not least because they currently concern themselves with ambitious extended essays that at the same time exemplify, straddle and expand the musical and structural boundaries. Not only do we get a good number of quite lengthy tracks here - Grandfather Mountain and Hangtown Ball both clock in at close on nine minutes, while the uncharacteristically lugubrious title track and three other cuts weigh in at well over five minutes. But the disc's magnum opus, without a doubt, is a 21-minute suite (described as a "progressive-folk symphony") that brings in strings, horns, penny whistle and piano to boost the basic sound and help illustrate Todd's thesis of the human condition with a swaggering confidence that's hard to resist.

That easy-going confidence and unpretentiously solid musicianship extends both out of and into the more obviously rollicking, open-skied and infectious spirit of tracks like Chasin' A Rainbow, When The Sun Gets Into Your Blood and the rockin'-and-rollin' One More Night On The Road. Then there's the equally infectious, easy-jamming earworm vibe of Hangtown Ball (complete with a shufflesome riff that's distinctly reminiscent of a classic Jerry Garcia lick). Only the rather vacuous soul groove of Monkey feels out of place, especially coming after the aforementioned progressive suite. This is a long album - close on 70 minutes - yet it's well worth the extra time you'll need to invest in it.

David Kidman