Since their last album appeared (Queen City Jubilee, reviewed here on 14 July 2018), the Toronto-based Slocan Ramblers have shrunk to a trio with the departure of bass player Alistair Whitehead. Last time, in addition to their originals, the Ramblers boasted their own takes on songs by the Carter Family, Don Stover, Barbecue Bob Hicks and tradition. This time it's all self-written and of various flavors. Happily, tradition's influence remains, and whatever the style, the dozen songs are unfailingly well-crafted and appealing.

Now more a string band than a strictly bluegrass group, the guys -- Darryl Poulsen, Adrian Gross, Frank Evans -- prove themselves again adept in harmony singing and in fashioning sweet and sturdy melodies as they range amid styles such as, yes, bluegrass (the deeply trad-sounding "You Said Goodbye"), the folkish ("Bill Fernie" and more), the jazz-inflected ("I Don't Know") and even acoustic rock (the lovably off-the-wall "A Mind with a Heart of Its Own").

Notwithstanding my broad preference for first-generation (and influenced-by) bands, I am not a bluegrass purist. Which is not necessarily to diss purists, all too tempting and all too tedious to do; to each his or her own, I say. Purism, though, is self-defeating when it keeps one from something that if one paid sufficient attention to it, one would embrace and have one's quality of life enhanced therefrom. That something may come from an effort to preserve what's worth preserving by offering an original but respectful vision of the tradition in question. The bluegrass audience long ago accepted the innovative Country Gentlemen and the even more trail-blazing Seldom Scene out of that understanding. In many ways the Slocan Ramblers are more conservative than either of these classic outfits, which stylistically they don't resemble all that much even if one suspects they're privately more radical than either.

There's this, too: the Slocan Ramblers' songs are more interesting than most bluegrass material being written these days. As I've had occasion to complain about in other reviews, even in our time composition within the genre tends to recycle cliches (mostly about relationships celebrated or failed, Jesus, the old home place, Mother, and the like, with the same stale lyrics and hoary sentiments). The Ramblers both know where bluegrass was born and grasp how folk revivals revisit and revise older sounds.

They also command serious chops and a fine sense of humor. I can't speak for you, but in my hearing and to my taste, that's a winning combination.