Artist:     Hat Fitz & Cara

Album:     Hand It Over

Label:     Self-Released

Release Date:     3.6.20 93

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One is a craggy Australian guitarist with a weatherworn voice known to work fertile hill country blues soil until his fingers bleed. The other is an Irish songbird turned drummer with a beat-up bagful of understated beats, whose love of vintage soul runs deep. Hand It Over finds Hat Fitz & Cara shacking up together to create an intimate, old-timey Americana that originates from rural Mississippi dirt, but lives all over the world. Think of them as missionaries of sounds from a bygone era saved from a thrift store that went out of business ages ago.

Having toured the globe for 10 long years, sweating profusely through too many raucous shows to count, the wedded couple has earned a reputation for its raw passion and righteous power onstage, and a wild blowout like “ADHD” off their newest LP does nothing to tarnish it. With its slide guitar frenzy, exuberant handclaps, Hat Fitz’s rough-hewn lead vocals and Cara’s spirited cheerleading from the sidelines, “ADHD” is an electrifying sermon of snake-handling gospel. The sinful swagger of “Harbour Master” tones down the chaos a tad, but it’s still a sassy sexpot of hustling, bluesy hurly-burly, as the forceful Cara steps to the fore as boss in domineering fashion to cut a cheating Casanova down to size.

Hand It Over also has its tender, haunted side, as the gently uplifting, seductive opener “Step Up” slowly meanders down whatever dusty melodic back roads and lost highways it chooses, Hat Fitz’s slippery picking a marvel of subtlety and grace. The soft, lapping soulfulness of “Hold On” is even more gripping and rich, with Cara’s sweet agony and sincerity engendering captivating rises and wounded falls. When she and Hat Fritz join their distinctively different voices, the blend of classy and earthy textures is something to behold, especially as their pounding, swaying version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Trimmed and Burning” emits a ghostly, chain-gang wail. They both play to their own strengths, however, and for the rustic closer “Unbound,” Hat Fritz takes out his fretless banjo and makes it cry salty tears, as the multi-instrumentalist Cara sings sorrowfully and lightly strums an acoustic guitar. Hat Fitz & Cara Hand It Over in nods to venerated greats, but somehow manage to never get completely trapped in the past on a siren song of a record.

—Peter Lindblad