The Tarbox Ramblers disc draws from both hillbilly and blues repertoires, thus blurring the boundary between America's black and white musical traditions. Further smudging those distinctions is the sound of string-band instruments - Johnny Sciascia's upright bass and Daniel Kellar's fiddle - set against Jon Cohan's blues drum stomp and Michael Tarbox's slide guitar. Carrying the day is the ghostly growl of Tarbox's vocals, which deny neither the inevitability of death nor the irrepressibility of desire. The Tarbox Ramblers came to Baltimore twice this year; both times the band made it clear that this was no museum re-creation of the past, but a raucous, rocking reminder that sex, death, and mystery mean as much to America's Internet present as they did to its dirt-road past. --- BALTIMORE CITY PAPER