Music releases: Crooked Still

STILL CROOKED

Signature Sounds

The boundaries of bluegrass music are tested with great frequency nowadays, and one of the acts doing listenable things at the genre’s outer fringes is Boston’s Crooked Still. Now a quintet after adding a pair of new members to replace one who left, the group plants an enticing new flag with its third album, “Still Crooked,” which strongly evokes the simple pleasures of mountain music even as it expands them with careful, if offbeat, design.

The group builds restless, almost agitated arrangements where pieces bubble forth into dense acoustic patchworks like that of the hearty Ola Belle Reed tune “Undone in Sorrow.” The breathy, lustrous vocals of Aoife O’Donovan are the straw that stirs these drinks, elegant on “Tell Her to Come Back Home” or smooth on “Pharaoh.”

Tragic, dark stories straight out of bluegrass tradition are comfortable fits, whether the casually haunting “Low Down and Dirty” with Gregory Liszt’s supple banjo backbone, or the propulsive “Poor Ellen Smith.” Even as it digs into blues for an energetic rendition of Mississippi John Hurt’s “Baby, What’s Wrong With You?” the group is built on fundamental bluegrass appeals, while still modern-leaning enough to stretch the way it interprets them.

— Thomas Kintner,

The Hartford Courant