eems like every ten days or so, some town crier music critic is ready to roll over the dirt on the grave of rock music. It’s to the point where the “Rock is Dead” mantra will fall out of know-it-all mouths as easy as acid rain from a brown Asian sky. "Hey Spin music guy, nice weather," one would say, to which Spin hipster replies "Looks like it’ll rain, Rock is Dead". Just as absurdly, it seems, some premature-ejaculating audiophile with black rimmed glasses and used CD price stickers slathered on his shower tiles is ranting about the next savior of rock. He’ll heap mounds of hyperbolic praise on bands like the White Stripes and the Strokes, and a multitude of other bands who are instantly hard-pressed to reach a level of talent or relativity as immense as their billing. Both of these chipper elitist androids are right, of course, to a degree...but the truth actually lies in some shady, nebulous ground in between.

What the aforementioned bands have in common, however, aside from a sound that varies a bit from current radio norms, is that, generally speaking, they all approximate the feel of one or more of rock’s staple bands: the Stripes recall a playful, minimalist Led Zeppelin, the Strokes a more corporate Velvet Underground or Stooges. For better or worse, and for the same reasons, this seems like five steps backwards to grave-digging Critic #1 and utterly rejuvenating to music-horny Critic #2. And although these bands aren’t completely rehashing a standard, it’s not hard to imagine a Nico poster on a teenaged Julian Casablancas’ bedroom wall or a Zoso tattoo on Jack White‘s calf. Similarly, and to much less fanfare, 20 Miles, the affair that guitarist Judah Bauer keeps on the side of his marriage to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, follows this line of creative borrowing. Keep It Coming, the band’s fifth album, features 15 quick punches of swampy rock that wears its influences on the sleeves of chunky guitar crunch from FM days of yore.

Much like Wilco’s Being There, or much of The Black Crowes’ entire catalog, Keep It Coming plays like a valentine to the second half of twentieth century rock. Bauer blows kisses to rock’s torchbearers, like the Rolling Stones (on the hand-clap happy “Rhythm Bound”) and Led Zeppelin (on the whirly “All My Brothers, Sisters Too!”), but it’s all filtered through a very modern indie rock polishing machine, one which makes a minimal blues stomp like the opener “Well, Well, Well” or the drowsy slide-guitar driven “Only One” feel like Wilco covering a song the Doors never recorded. Similarly, gritty pop like songs like “Silver String,” “Feel Right,“ or “Mend Your Heart” wouldn’t feel out of place on the Singles soundtrack or Primal Scream‘s Give Out But Don‘t Give Up.

And although not every song is a breathtaking, gush-worthy zenith in time-spanning rawk, Keep It Coming is an engaging listen throughout. And regardless of where it feels like this album came from, there is little doubt where it actually is, and that’s firmly planted in today, whether as an antidote to Kid Rock or simply a prescription for a more palatable alternative.

But, as is the fate of the majority of side projects, 20 Miles probably won’t get much press between now and the Top 10 list frenzy season, much less in 20 years like the bands they craftily recall. Shame really, because Keep It Coming deftly molds 40 years of kinetic, blues-infested rock onto a handy disc for the blunt-smoking, classic-rock fetishist hipster.

Yeah, so rock still probably isn’t dead yet. Now where’s that sock...