It shouldn't be necessary to label the Austin-based Steve Howell & the Mighty Men "eccentric." For one thing, they're musically accomplished, and for another, they are demonstrably not crazy or unreasonable, unless your tastes are so rock-centric that anything else feels threatening or simply weird.

Howell and company (whom I've reviewed here on 21 November 2015 and 14 July 2018) are eccentric, however, in the context of a scene that claims, or at least did so in its heyday, to be based in "roots" but rarely was even at its prime. When Howell calls his label "Out of the Past Music," he means it, by which he is calling up the actual roots. The songs he sings and the instrumentals he plays are out of time. He and his boys love old folk songs, trad jazz, blues and the American Songbook. They just don't perform them like anybody else.

This is a small electrical outfit indifferent to the sonic possibilities. The arrangements are muted and intimate, set to tell stories rather than to pound heads. The sound is spare, not quite otherworldly but close enough to feel as if an alternative reality could be shaped out of these elements. At the same time the music is fully grounded while never being quite as you remember the originals, if your tastes are like Howell's and you know where the inspiration for these cuts began.

The music he desires to revive pretty much ends in the 1960s. I'm old enough to remember what got aired on the radio in those days, but oddly, though I'm with Howell on the other stuff (traditional folk, downhome blues), I'm usually taken aback to see what Baby Boomer tunes he chooses to revisit. My fond recollection does not embrace Gerry & the Pacemakers' "Ferry Cross the Mersey" and Los Bravos' "Black is Black," in my estimation two of the dopier hits of my teenage years. I have, on the other hand, learned not to panic.

By the time Howell and company have turned their attention to even misbegotten hackwork, misbegotten hackwork is sounding presentable. Here, words are removed from "Ferry," and it's turned into an instrumental. That instrumental, which abruptly turns ominous, could pass as the theme song of a James Bond film. As for "Black," an even steeper climb, the band manages, improbably, to raise it to something like a Ry Cooder level of respectability.

But the bulk of Been Here & Gone is rooted in deeper traditions and profounder artists: Texas prison song "Jimmy Bell," Big Bill Broozy's "Willie Mae," Rev. Gary Davis's "Candyman," Appalachian violence's "Wild Bill Jones," plus excursions into oldtime jazz and jazz-pop, all of it encapsulated in one place: the fertile, surprising imagination of Howell and those who help him realize his vision. Over the last few years that sort of thing has impressed and moved me enough that the discovery of a new Steve Howell album amid the mail piled on my front porch has come to promise something out of the ordinary, even the ordinarily pleasurable. Once again, something special has been delivered.

[ visit Steve Howell & the Mighty Men online ]