Hot Buttered Rum w/ The Roller Mills String Band

Though they’re inspired more by The Grateful Dead’s twangy, jammy tributes to Americana than bluegrass’s Appalachian forefathers, Hot Buttered Rum is nonetheless one of the more traditional modern bluegrass (“newgrass”) acts, a San Francisco quintet that may exaggerate the genre’s sharp tones, but never plays them for novelty. Of course, the group brings its own ideology to the music. It’s doubtful, for instance, that Bill Monroe would have written a jam about biofuel, as Hot Buttered Rum did for the title track of their 2006 disc, Well-Oiled Machine. “What the restaurant kitchens dump, I want to pump,” Nat Keefe sings about the band’s tour bus, which has been retrofitted to run on both biodiesel and second-hand vegetable oil.