On their sophomore release, the Blue Rags have allowed a little more rock into their mixture of ragtime and blues. It's still impossible to listen to their music without being transported back a hundred years to a time when men were men and a pocketful of change could buy a whole night's worth of whiskey, but tracks like "Can't Tie That Knot" acknowledge the evolutionary path from the syncopated piano of barrelhouse rags to the boisterous and scandalous proto-rock of the 1950s. It's also a sonic monument to Americana; when you listen to "American Man" and "Baby Back", for instance, you get honest songs about working hard and living hard and drinking hard, not whiny little tunes about how hard it is to find just the right color Mercedes. You can feel the road dust in your shoes, taste the cheap liquor and hear the door slam as your woman takes off out the back door. Production by (the titular) Joe Blaney, who has worked with the Clash, occasionally adds a bit too much polish to the Blue Rags' sound -- here and there, I noticed them veering dangerously into Blues Traveler territory, and on rare occasions, through some weird reverse-parallel-evolution congruence, they sound alarmingly like the Grateful Dead. But those are minor concerns, easily ignored when Eat At Joe's is played at high volume in a packed, smoky bar. Under those conditions, it's just like American country cooking -- solid and satisfying.