For the five albums she recorded with her slow-burning country band Trailer Bride, Melissa Swingle weaved her backporch stories and hillbilly jitterbug voice through a peculiar salvo of banjo, mandolin, and stand-up bass. Rising from the ashes of that North Carolina band, the Moaners (guitarist/vocalist Swingle and drummer Laura King) shaker it up, delivering a deadly dose of juke-joint blues made famous in Swingle's native Mississippi. King's punk-rock stance and Swingle's slow-burning twang--thick as honey and owing as much to Polly Harvey as to Exene Cervenka--ride in tandem with harmonica and a lethal slide guitar that Swingle copped from homey Fred McDowell, most notably on the swollen-with-pride Southern anthem "Yankee on My Shoulder." She can pay homage to her scholarly Delta roots one moment ("Poor Souls") and salute a 1970s blaxploitation character the next ("Foxy Brown"), and when Swingle declares over a shotgun beat, "When we're dead and gone, there will still be a song" ("When We're Dead & Gone"), she makes it nearly impossible to doubt.--Scott Holter