It seems surprising that the Magnolia Sisters refer to this as Stripped Down. Their sound has always been predicated on the core instrumentation with little outside embellishment, but truth be told, this one is barer compared to Lapin, Lapin, their previous release.

Yet, just because it’s barer doesn’t mean it’s austere or stark. The Sisters cover a lot of ground stylistically—lively fiddle duets, feathery finger picking, Calypso beats, honking squeezebox bass notes that blossom into full-tilt twosteps and dead-on, muted guitar barre chords. There are examples of Creole-style accordion versus the more ornamented Cajun variety, the combining of like melodies for a new version of an old, obscure song (“Point Clear Blues”) and tunes that exhibit a raw, primal groove including Clarence Garlow’s “Bon temps rouler.” Yet, two things in particular make the Magnolia Sisters stand out, the first of which is their delectable harmonies. “À boire, à boire” features resounding, full-bodied choruses sung by all. Jane Vidrine’s harmonizing above Savoy’s vocals on “Pourquoi tu m’as trahi?” is not only memorable; it’s quite haunting.

The second thing is their emphasis on drones, which is accomplished by slowly bowing against the fiddle’s open strings. It makes their music sound ancient and adds a spine-tingling sense of surrealism (“Goodbye, chère amie”) to the proceedings. For supposedly being stripped down, the Magnolia Sisters still get a lot of sound by leveraging whatever’s around them.

—Dan Willging