Marcoux Corner's Buyin' Time is very good overall. The group has made its home in North Dakota, and so invites comparison with their musical predecessors there, The Blenders. They have more than just geography in common with that group. Both groups are made up of four guys; both have a consistently smooth blend and few tuning problems (such as the spoken-word counterpoint in Contemptible); finally, both earn big kudos for their wide range of originals.

Marcoux Corner makes good use of its time in the studio. The recording is uniformly crisp and well-mastered, with all parts audible and the important parts more so. Equalization on the vocal percussionist is also appropriate (surprisingly, the vocal percussionist does better with the more difficult snare than with the easier velar aspirate). This should be a lesson to all groups. Too many recent recordings have used engineering to take their sound well past the point of repeat listenability (e.g., Blind Man's Bluff). Marcoux Corner rightly errs on the side of underpresentation, allowing their music to speak for itself.

The songs themselves are split nearly evenly between covers and originals, and the singers are equally at home with both. All of the songs should probably be described as tame, perhaps polite; the opening track, Mustang Sally, has been toned down from rock to pop, and the other songs have a similar feel. Nice, energetic? Yes. Rocking, soulful? No.

The originals are all in this same, polite vein. Some are quite successful (Changes; Someday Soon), others more ordinary, if not banal (Your Kisses). In general, they suffer from what increasingly seems to be an epidemic in the contemporary a cappella community: the inability to distinguish musically, lyrically, or interpretively between the verses and the chorus. On none of the originals is there a substantial move to a particular chord progression, a catchy and comprehensible lyric, or a decisive shift of emphasis on the part of the soloist. The contrast with something as trite as Footloose is instructive. Again, Marcoux Corner is not alone in not understanding how to write a chorus. This might be a good topic for a seminar at an A Cappella Summit.

All told, Buyin' Time is thoroughly enjoyable in almost every respect, with only soul left out. A pleasant debut from Marcoux Corner, from whom we should continue to expect solid and ultimately persuasive a cappella in years to come.