Mexican Gunfight is a rock band with a big and easy notion of what “rock” can do. Stylistic influences abound: blues grit, country lyricism, the soulfulness of gospel, a jam thrown in … even tinges of Latin and jazz dot their sonic landscape. But the Gunfight doesn’t lay claim to being a blues, country or gospel act … they’re really just a rock band.

The band’s instinctive ability to play seamlessly together is perhaps one of the first things to impress, and betrays the band’s experience: Mexican Gunfight’s personnel have wandered the U.S. tour routes together for nearly a quarter century, in a half-dozen different outfits, thousands of shows and in hundreds of venues (not to mention a variety of interesting vehicles). Perhaps most notably, their incarnation as The Renegade Saints got regional acclaim and national attention back in the early ’90s, but even then they were too rockin’ to be a jam band, and definitely too free-form to be grunge.