Orso is an insurgent country band. That fact certainly wasn’t obvious to me when their self-titled debut came out in late 1998. If anything, I put the disc into the box in my head marked experimental. Orso’s proximity to country became more apparent when I saw them play last year with fellow Chicagoans and alt-country oddballs The Handsome Family. For all of their differences, the two acts had a comparable aesthetic, a similar spine. Now Orso’s Long Time By has sealed the deal.

Sure, they aren’t the same kind of insurgent country band as Wilco or the Old ‘97s. Long Time By isn’t about having a rip-roaring time, at least not the way those boys have a time. But it is about the same subject much new country music tackles – the transposition of rural instruments, and rural themes, to an urban environment. So there’s a banjo, and a broken-down sort of rhythm on "Logs #1". So what if there’s also electronic augmentation, and an unlikely arrangement? By the end of the song, most of the sounds could be made by an old guy sitting on his porch in Alabama.

Long Time By makes itself clearer than its predecessor in a number of ways. The record is overwhelmingly more coherent than the last release, which boded well but didn’t quite get there. Despite new-found clarity, though, Orso continues to do what they did well from the start: layer intriguing and varying noises in interesting ways. This time around, those noises are more often melded with more traditional song structures and melodies. “Mavis”, for example, takes an almost-traditional sounding country ballad and rolls it on top of bubble sounds and subtle bits of unusual percussion, balancing the impulse toward exploration with a more anchoring structure. The resulting work is both emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating -- which is, after all, what all good country music should strive for.