Album: The Boggs

We are the Boggs we are, Arena Rock/Rykodisc

The ripples caused by the collective impact of The White Stripes, the O Brother... soundtrack and Dylan's resurgent interest in roots music continue to spread out across American rock. The latest addition to the ranks of country-blues throwbacks are The Boggs. Their debut album cover throws off several distinctly English associations – the casually-read magazine, like Clapton on the Bluesbreakers sleeve, singer-songwriter Jason Friedman's striking resemblance to Richard Ashcroft, and the cover shot's similarity to the first Faces album – but their material and performances are deeply rooted in the mulch of American traditional music.

The Boggs have the authentic feel of white-trash kids grown lean and hungry on a musical diet of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, with its long-gone and mostly forgotten troubadours such as Bascom Lamar Lunsford, The Carter Family, and especially Dock Boggs, the grim, banjo-picking bluesman from whom they take their name.

The opening track "Whiskey and Rye" sets out their style, with banjos and old National steel guitars attacked with gusto over cavernous, bruising drums, the smalltown dancehall ambience evoking the feel of a well-lubricated Cajun fais-do-do. But just when you've got them numbered as the American heartland equivalent of The Pogues, they cut through the levity with "Hard Times", a darker, haunted piece plumbing untold depths of pessimism.

We Are the Boggs We Are features all new material written in the old tradition, and recorded with appropriate lo-fi intensity: you can all but hear the scratch and crackle of old 78s. Friedman proves an accomplished juggler of old and new, skilfully updating the classic forms in "Poor Audrey James", a typical abused-maiden tale with a feminist sting in the tale, and "How Long?", in which blues and gospel culture is condensed down to a series of charged, bleak phrases: "The devil lies low"; "Black cold day".

The Boggs come closest to their namesake on the chilly "On North Wood Ground", a desolate tableau of a night burial, but elsewhere there are echoes of old, familiar forms – the migrant-worker lament "Beside The Windowsill", the gospel uplift of "Airborne Station", and the sense of community in "We Shall Meet Again". What's particularly striking about the group, though, is the way they've drained their performances of any hint of post-modern irony, with Emily Jane Oviatt's vocal on the duet "Emily, O, Emily" capturing the authentically thin, reedy quality of Sara Carter, and Friedman's stumblebum mumble coating his songs with the requisite veneer of alcoholic laissez-faire attitude. A remarkable debut.