It's hard not to like The Bourbon Dynasty's self-titled debut, even before having heard a note. I mean, it's right there in the gatefold: "Vince McCool, trumpet." If a band that enlists a trumpeter with a name like that isn't a winner, I don't know who is. He should have an 80's cop show where he rock and rolls all night and solves crime every day.

The Bourbon Dynasty themselves don't rock nearly as hard as the Vince McCool of my imaginings. Not that it's a bad thing. In fact, the band tends to be at its best when they're playing no-frills country or blue eyed soul straight out of 60's AM radio, rather than the few real rockers sprinkled around the tracklist. And in that diversity, the record is a lot like D.C. weather: don't like what's going on right now? Wait a minute, a change is always right around the corner.

The band, a blending of journeyman local musicians with at least a half-dozen "formerly ofs" in their C.V., play with the loose energy of a bunch of guys who love what they're doing, and that's the record's greatest strength, saving it on those occasions when songs veer too close to Jimmy Buffet-esque bar-band forgettability long enough to get to the more genuinely affecting country laments.

Full disclosure: this reviewer has never met a bar-blues band that didn't make him want to order up double shots of whiskey until he was too drunk to remember who the hell was playing that night. Add gospel singers (as Bourbon Dynasty do on a couple of occasions), and the picture is less pretty. Yet in spite of these touches, there's something eminently likeable about the record, which I guess means that if those things really do it for you, the band does it pretty damn well.

Make no mistake. This is not roots rock dressed up in post-modern irony, even if songwriter Charles Walston does name-check cans of PBR. When these guys play, they mean every note. That kind of earnestness can work for or against you, but Bourbon Dynasty work it to their advantage. And on the standout tracks, the pleading George Jones with-a-dash-of-Elvis swagger of "Stop to Reconsider", or the drunken, rough-edges-sanded Tom Waits stagger of "Behind Closed Doors", Walston's songwriting and world-weary voice carry the band far beyond any faint "pretty good for a bar band" praise meted out by fickle and pretentious rock critics.

Ultimately, for the listener, the record succeeds on the same premise that Vince McCool succeeds as an evocative name. The aesthetic is simple and straightforward, and makes no apologies. If it hits you the right way, you're bound to have a good time with it. If not, you can sit in the corner sulking or drink until you're loosened up enough to forget your intellectualized complaints, but either way, The Bourbon Dynasty just came to play, and have a damn good time doing it.

The Bourbon Dynasty appear with Rambling Shadows this Friday at The Red and The Black, doors at 9 p.m., $8.