This is not a country album. Most albums aren't, of course, but this one shoots enough nods in country's direction -- allusions in lyrics, melodies, harmonies and instruments -- that an enterprising promoter might be tempted to market Nineteen Hand Horse, based in California, to an audience that in short order would be bewildered and no doubt grossly offended. California does claim a rich history in the genre, the home base of luminaries including Spade Cooley, the Maddox Brothers & Rose, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Dwight Yoakam and more. Before he moved from the West Coast to New York City to become a legendary folk singer, Woody Guthrie performed as a country musician. There is a well-researched book on the subject, Gerald W. Haslam's Workin' Man Blues: Country Music in California (1994).

But Nineteen Hand Horse, if it's any kind of country (and it isn't), is something else. Consider, for example, this couplet in the title tune:

You better start reveling in your irrelevance,
F##k kids and everything that they say.

My initial response was exactly what yours is at this moment. On second listening, though, I caught the humor. It helps if you know the country music industry's long, cynical exploitation of children, typically depicted as cute, dead or dying, or innocent of the shameful ways of adults. Whatever the context, it always feels icky as well as unfair to kids, who deserve better. Country music has little shame, as witness its mountainous assemblage of songs celebrating reactionary resentments, bellicose nationalism, failure to grasp that in a free society you have to tolerate people and beliefs you may not agree with. It is only to be expected that your average country fan voted for Donald Trump and awaits his return, possibly on a cloud of glory. Yes, I know there is an abundance of good, even occasionally brilliant, country songs; otherwise I'd have no reason to be a lifelong listener to same. It's just that the bad stuff is so spectacularly awful that it can take up permanent residence inside the head and torment you to the end of your days.

In any event, the album is awash in jarring profanity and abrasive perspective. Since I wasn't prepared for such, Revel immediately put me off, not angering me so much as delivering the impression that it wouldn't be much fun to listen to. As so often happens, I was wrong. With each listening the humor -- and, dare I say it, the warmth -- grew ever more manifest, to the degree that much of actual mainstream country seemed dour, phony and unpleasant in comparison. We may be sure, for example, that no Nashville hack will ever compose "The Withering Romance of Trains" or "Better as a Goddess (Than a Lover)." The latter even quotes Frankie Avalon's dopey, otherwise-forgotten "Venus," hugely popular among teenagers living and consuming in 1959. In a more serious vein, Revel pays tribute to cult figure/Texas singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard in "Remarkable Dude."

The musicianship and the artistry are first-rate, as one begins to notice and appreciate the longer the listener stays with Nineteen Hand Horse. At the core of the band are Mark Montijo and Nathalie Archangel (so it says here), a now-married couple who met in California while working civilian jobs after failing, separately, to achieve pop stardom (though Archangel had success as a songwriter for Bette Midler). With their band they fashion what to my ears sounds like, the ironic and absurdist lyrics aside, 1970s rock-pop with the occasional hillbilly flourish. Except it's a whole lot funnier.