Portland Phoenix | Good As It Gets: With sixth album, the Mallett Brothers Band are one of Maine's finest exports

Billed as an alt-country group from Maine, the Mallett Brothers Band have always seemed like an exercise in a multiple identities. Beginning in earnest in 2009, the band’s early albums occupied a space between heartland country — always a bit of a stretch for Portlanders — and something called “arena-country” — which, I guess, means country musicians who want to make as much money as the Avett Brothers.

But it’s over their last few albums that things have gotten interesting. In 2017, the Mallett Brothers Band whipped up The Falling of the Pine, an album of 19th century working (and drinking) songs from the Maine lumberyards. The boys sniffed out this trail stumbling upon a book in their parents’ house, an heirloom written by old world Maine folklorist Fannie Hardy Eckstorm titled The Minstrelsy of Maine: Folk Songs and Ballads of the Woods and the Coast. For any other group, it would have felt like a gimmick, but for the Malletts, it seemed to fit like a glove, a functional answer to the question, “What is Maine country music, anyway?”