Industry & Thrift
Since 1992'sDelusions of Banjer, Bad Livers have been sowing a great, wild hybrid of bluegrass picking and punk abandon. Six years later,Industry and Thriftshows these boys working familiar fields on scorching bluegrassers such as "I'm Goin' Back to Mom and Dad." But they're harvesting some unexpected crops this time, too: the Cali country-rock choruses of "It's All the Same to Me," for example, and a Stevie Ray Vaughan-like blues-rock version of Flatt & Scruggs's "Doin' My Time," not to mention some twangy klezmer jams and silent-movie-era jazz--all of it held together by sheer quality and the general lack of anything resembling industry or thrift. That's how the sorry characters here came to have, or be, bad livers in the first place.--David Cantwell