From the Pasture to the Future

The Chicago Tribune says that the Waybacks offer "a near-ideal balance of irreverence, chops, discipline, and originality," and that actually sums it up quite well. This primarily acoustic folk-rock group is irreverent about genre boundaries, jumping gleefully back and forth between the lines that separate blues from bluegrass, rock from jazz, and Celtic music from pop, but they're never so irreverent that they just sound goofy. Their chops are considerable, but (in the studio anyway) they never lapse into wanky self-indulgence. Their discipline and originality are manifest in tightly written, hook-filled songs and unusual arrangements, and all of those qualities come together beautifully in this, the group's fourth album. From the Pasture to the Future offers brilliant instrumental hot jazz ("Monkey Pants," "Hot Kranski"), a sharply rocking kissoff song ("Helping Me," which features the timeless couplet "It's not that you're bad for me/It's just that you're bad"), and a very fine rhumba ("Armando's Rhumba"). It also features a funny folk-rock number titled "Petrified Man" and a beautiful Texas-style dance number called "Bluebird Waltz." The Waybacks are not terribly convincing as purveyors of straight-up traditional Irish music, as "The Blacksmith" demonstrates, but everything else works so well that you hardly even notice that one. Very highly recommended.