Flatlanders

Early pressings of this album, the latest attempt to determine just what the hell the Flatlanders are, come packaged with bonus live tracks from 1972 — right about the time the band sank beneath the world’s radar. Since then, the three principals — high-lonesome Jimmie Dale Gilmore; Joe Ely, the Lone Star Springsteen; and Butch Hancock, a kind of Hanna-Barbera Dylan — have each achieved their own cult followings. So it’s no surprise that reunion records like Wheels of Fortune feel less like the product of a working band than they do material produced by enormously gifted friends taking cracks at their favorite songs. But it works. Still, what’s missing is the loose, ragged, ghostly quality of the band’s pre-breakup years. This incarnation offers professional coffeehouse country that lopes pleasantly but doesn’t quite rock when it tries to. And yet, the album is warm, aphoristic and without a single duff tune. It also doesn’t feel like a late-career revival. After all these years, this is only the band’s third album, and it feels just as vital as the work of any younger band just hitting that milestone.