After five studio albums and one live farewell disc, Bellowhead disbanded in 2016, to the dismay of us who adored the band. That sentence will mean little to anybody but a relative handful of North American readers since the outfit's reputation was confined largely to the British Isles, where its creative adaptation of traditional songs, ballads and instrumentals earned it a following that transcended the core folk audience and attracted enough fans to land it, if modestly, on the pop charts.

Reassembled is a new Bellowhead recording. "New," however, is relative, inasmuch as the album is a revisiting of previously recorded material. Streamed live last year, it happily betrays no evidence of diminishing excellence and enthusiasm. You'd never guess that the crew had been off the job for four years. Reassembled is the perfect place to catch up on the band if you haven't heard it before.

Bellowhead's intellectual authors are Jon Biden and John Spiers, a folk duo formed in 1999. As they tell the story, one day while on tour they got stuck in city traffic. To relieve boredom, they got to chatting about a band it would be fun to put together. Initially mere idle conversation, it evolved into something more serious the longer they talked. They thought of friends on whose talents they'd like to draw. In due course, as speculation found a path into reality, Bellowhead came to comprise 10 players and singers, among them horn players as well as string artists. Its first album, Burlesque, released on a German label in 2006, is still my favorite, I suspect because of the stunning "Jordan." That's a 19th-century English variant of "Jordan is a Hard Road to Travel," Daniel Decatur Emmett's second-most famous song -- "Dixie" is the first -- and a staple even today of oldtime string bands. Unfortunately, it's not reprised here.

Even so, within the generous hour and 15 minutes of these metaphorical grooves, there's plenty of superior stuff, British-accented but sometimes American-derived such as the shanteys "Roll Alabama" (about a historical Confederate warship), "Roll the Woodpile Down" (not the landlubbers' version associated with, most famously, Uncle Dave Macon as "Hold the Woodpile Down") and "New York Girls." For the most part, however, it's English standards (though in nothing like standard performances) such as "Cold Blows the Wind," "Yarmouth Town" and "Rosemary Lane." Among the features that make Bellowhead so thrilling is its impressive command of rare variants of familiar material as well as its way of modernizing the tradition while never abandoning its spirit.

While the notion of a big band usually calls jazz or r&b to mind, except for occasional stylistic asides (and scattered rock touches), that is not what one is hearing here. This is the English tradition reimagined for multiple instruments, with an abundance at once of rollicking energy and proper respect for those gorgeous, time-shaped melodies. You don't often hear old and new so memorably fused, in a fashion that should dazzle both veteran and novice listeners. Put broadly, Bellowhead is in the revisionist mode of neo-English folk music exemplified by Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Albion Band and Pentangle, but beyond that, it boasts a sound so distinctive that for all practical purposes it is in a category of one.

If without overwhelming optimism, one hopes that one day Bellowhead steps onto stage and into studio with a fresh set of songs and tunes. But even if that never happens, Reassembled delivers the happy memory of one exceptional outfit that propelled the tradition into the 21st century.