When a musical artist hits his stride and produces one meaty release after another, attention must be paid. Case in point: Chuck McCabe. Building on the momentum of his fiendishly listenable 2004 release, Chicken Dinners and 2002's equally tasty Bad Gravity Day, the northern California-based singer-songwriter's Sweet Reunion is the richest, most ambitious album of his career. Sweet Reunion attests to the full creative maturity of its maker and indeed the vitality of the album as a musical format. Download a choice cut or two, but you'll want the CD, not least for its elegant design, but mainly to hear a contemporary artist at the top of his game.

As a kind of gene mapping of a minstrel boy's progress, McCabe's Sweet Reunion will take a place among clbuttic albums of Americana, such as Arlo Guthrie's Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys, Maria Muldaur's Waitress in a Donut Shop, The McGarrigle's Hour, and Lyle Lovett's Joshua Judges Ruth. Each is a meditation on the burdens of family and of the individual's place among larger traditions.

In a baker's dozen of songs featuring A-list players and sensitive production, McCabe draws on the raw materials of American music - Celtic pipes, gospel piano, bluegrbutt banjo, ragtime horns - to produce a wry, often haunting exploration of his own roots, ancestral and musical, and of the modern minstrel's response to an ever scarier modern world. Each song draws meaning from the whole, with instrumental motifs and reprises re-connecting the songs in new, potent ways.

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