In a week dedicated to saccharine hearts and cloying phrases like "Be Mine," it does an old sour-mash soul good to hear tunes like "Lumpy, Beanpole and Dirt," in which a disenchanted beau tells his lady love to "Buy me some wine and some good old turpentine and give yourself a healthy little squirt." The Bad Livers began as an Austin-style lark: A single banjo/guitar picker, optimistically billing himself as the Danny Barnes Trio (with the hope other players will show up), hooks up with an upright bass and tuba player named Mark Rubini and they release a psychotic bluegrass rendition of Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life."

Local music critics were happier than pigs in shit when the pair broke onto the Austin scene in 1990, but since then, the integration of country and punk has grown as commonplace as milkweed. So the Bad Livers deserted their bucolic covers of Motsrhead and Metallica tunes and turned to more fertile pastures. Over the course of four increasingly eloquent and consistently mirthful albums, the Livers have continued to merge rock posture, klezmer abandon, and bluegrass instrumentation with a jazzy virtuosity, but lyrically they have settled comfortably down-home. Industry and Thrift finds our boys joined by a slew of friends pluckin' and blowin' their way through a joyous mutation of the klezmer traditional "A Yid Ist Geboren inz Oklahoma," a solemn nod to Walt Whitman in "Captain, Oh Captain," and the slap-giddy "Brand New Hat" with its hard-pressed clod of truth, "It makes you look like somebody else/ It's hard enough to keep track of yourself."

The Bad Livers perform at Amoeba Music for free on Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 5:30 p.m.; call 831-1200. And at Great American Music Hall that same night with the Tony Furtado Band opening at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10; call 885-0750.