Two Alvins, Two Albums and No $%&*@ Chipmunks

Brothers Dave and Phil Alvin are sometimes credited with creating the modern genre of Americana music, but they would probably say they weren't creating anything, just keeping great music alive when the fickle and superficial attention span of chart success turned itself elsewhere.

The brothers first gained attention and success by fronting the Blasters, easily one of the top roots-rock bands of any time and certainly front and center during their own late 1970s-early 1980s heyday. Dave left the Blasters in 1986 while brother Phil kept the band going, and their personal differences aired out now and again with some minor public bickering. Phil's health scare in 2013 apparently covered enough of the breach for them to record together again, and they released Common Ground -- an album of Big Bill Broonzy cover songs -- in 2014. As they explained, while they might have fought about a lot of things, they didn't fight about Big Bill Broonzy.

Broonzy was a blues and folk singer-songwriter less well-known than pioneer rockers like Chuck Berry or blues superstars like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. But his many blues and folk songs generally reflect more deeply than his better-known peers on some of the same subjects. The Alvins use their best tools to create faithful updates of a dozen Broonzy nunbers. Phil with his voice and Dave with his guitar both perform and transform the originals while remaining faithful to Broonzy's own sound. Dave sings as well, but doesn't try to put his lower register to use in places it doesn't need to be -- and the duets add a dimension that the old Blasters records never had. The pairing is most effective on the opener "All By Myself" and on "Stuff They Call Money," while Dave's lead vocals on songs like "Southern Flood Blues" capture the folkier dimension of Broonzy's songs

Both in a personal sense for people who were fans of the Blasters and who liked it better when the brothers got along, and in the artistic sense where their complimentary gifts added up to even more than the considerable sum of their parts, Common Ground was a welcome new chapter of American music.

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The success of Common Ground led Dave and Phil to try their luck again, only this time picking from several catalogs instead of just one. Their love for Joe Turner shows up as three of his numbers make the cut for 2105's Lost Time, but others range from Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey to James Brown.

These adaptations are in some ways even looser than those from the earlier album, although once again the Alvins' love for their source material shines through. "Rattlesnakin' Daddy" draws from both earlier sources, folk blues singer Blind Boy Fuller and country crooner Hawkshaw Hawkins, and then spins the results in with Dave's vocal strut to make an immensely fun leer-and-a-wink brag.

Lost Time opens with "Mr. Kicks," from Oscar Brown, Jr.'s unstaged musical Kicks and Co. The Alvins' version of the story of "Satan's sinning servant" who lures people to destruction with a hollow promise of fun and excitement marries Chicago blues to Broadway lyrics for a caustic story of temptation. Phil's plaintive vocals on "Please Please Please" invest the number with as much energy as James Brown ever gave it even if their vocals aren't at all alike.

And again, the brothers select excellent songs for their duets, like the folky hand clapper "Papa's on the House Top" and the gospel singalong "If You See My Savior." Age seems to have taught them how to better blend their singing, so that Phil's energy and volume don't blow Dave's laconic baritone away as they might have during the Blasters days. A reviewer at Allmusic says that if the Alvins want to keep releasing annual batches of these awesome covers until the sun sets on them that will be just fine with him, and it's very hard to disagree.