Revival bands--as good a term as any to describe artists specializing in musical forms of the distant past (roughly anything predating the invention of the cassette tape)--come in all shapes and flavors, and choosing a favorite is like ordering a steak: a bit over- or underdone and you're liable to send it straight back to the chef. Should you order something hip and current with a high irony content, like the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, or do you go for authenticity freaks like the Beau Hunks Orchestra, who record old film scores live in front of a single microphone and to hell with all that "mixing" nonsense? These artists have to tread carefully. If they're too free with their idiom, they risk being dismissed as another pack of ignorant smart-aleck kids latching onto whatever market fad will get them noticed; if they're too faithful to it, well, they're boring, no matter how fine their musicianship or how noble their intentions. Respect for tradition may be a virtue, but it's a virtue musicians are usually better off leaving in the box than wearing on their sleeves.

If you had to place Texas' Asylum Street Spankers on that continuum, you'd probably put them closer to "faithful"; for a start, they insist on performing their near-legendary live shows entirely sans amplification--"as God intended it," as they like to say. Yet it's not as simple as that, because the invariable next question--"To what, exactly, are the Spankers being faithful?"--leads you head-on into the peculiar undefineability of the Spankers' style. Certainly on Hot Lunch, the group's latest release, there are elements you recognize: some jump blues, a bit of barbershop quartet, torch balladry, kitsch-Hawaiian, and straight-up country, to name a few. There are clarinets, banjos, double basses, and acoustic guitars; there are also harmonicas, washboards, saws, spoons, and the occasional gunshot or explosion. The result of this mish-mash is that the Spankers don't sound so much old as odd. They're like a band you would see on an alternate-universe episode of Star Trek, in which the crew goes back to a late twentieth century in which Glenn Miller lived to a ripe old age, Chuck Berry never picked up a guitar, and the Beatles broke up midway through recording Rubber Soul.

Though the prospect of a Revolver-less world may frighten you, it shouldn't scare you away from "Hot Lunch," which is a hell of a lot of fun. There are nine men and one woman in the Asylum Street Spankers as of this writing, and nearly all of them are multi-instrumentalists, and good ones at that. Eamon McGloughlin's fiddle work alone defies categorization: his playing on the vaguely-latin, vaguely-Yiddish instrumental title track is full of wit and verve, yet avoids straying into tastelessness or plain showing off. Christina Marrs, in addition to pounding a mean saw, is a terrific vocalist, with a versatility almost extinct among pop singers. Listen to her hilarious Olive Oyl impersonation on "New Jazz Fiddle," the tortured atmospherics on the smoky "Blue Prelude," and the laid-back winsomeness of the album-opening "Cakewalk" and you'll be surprised, and enormously pleased, to realize they're sung by the same woman. There's a lot more to digest among these 16 tracks--nearly every song has a stellar moment and some actually have too many--and there are more than enough courses to satisfy any taste.

If the Spankers get a gold star for musicianship, they score rather less highly on songcraft. Of the dozen or so original songs on Hot Lunch, roughly half are little more than musical in-jokes, entertaining and funny but not fully nourishing. The chief culprit here is singer and ukele player Pops Bayless, who delights in peppering his lyrics with anachronisms: "I Don't Wanna" by itself mentions Nijinsky, Teapot Dome, the sinking of the Maine, and John Phillip Sousa, while the faux-French cabaret song "Bijou" begins with the line "When I was a doughboy in Paris," and from there progresses more or less how you would expect. Now you may feel differently, but I don't think anyone who wasn't a doughboy has any business writing about doughboys, in Paris or anywhere else. We all agree that songwriters should be free to write about whatever they want, but the trouble with songs like these is that there's nothing to hold your interest once the joke wears off; it's like licking the frosting off a cupcake and finding nothing underneath. We all enjoy the occasional "Honey Pie," but imagine the White Album with eight other tracks just like it and you begin to see the danger.

Don't write the Spankers off just yet, though; they have Wammo. Ah, Wammo. Wammo (can you tell I love that name?) writes without a trace of the cutesiness that sometimes afflicts his fellow composers-in-residence. His "Tripping Over You" is a worthy addition to the "being with you is like being really high" subgenre, while "Asylum Street Blues" is stark and spooky and likely to provoke rather uneasy laughter. Humor is a big component of Wammo's style--not ingratiating humor, but humor that lunges, bites, and sometimes flat-out sickens. Wammo's songs provide Hot Lunch with its most enduring pleasures, from the caustic anti-yuppie satire of "Smells Like Thirtysomething" to a bouncy sad-sack country tune called "The Sad Bomber," about a jilted lover who uses high explosives to vent his romantic disillusionment. It's with songs like these that the Spankers go beyond simple pastiche, creating music that's original and fun--and worth a few listens.