Curtis Eller is nostalgic for a lot of things that happened before he was born -- Buster Keaton movies, Al Jolson songs, Luna Park, Amelia Earhart, even the old-time music that forms the fabric of his songs. He's artful enough about it, fortunately, that you'll go along for the ride. You'll feel "Coney Island Blue"'s mournfulness almost personally, even if you've never thought twice about lost landmarks on Stilwell Avenue, just because of the sweet-sour melancholy of accordion and banjo. You enter into "Sugar in My Coffin"'s bluegrassy belligerence the way the song's regulars belly up to the bar, not thinking for even a moment about how modern or old-fashioned the tune is. Like an actor who fully inhabits a role, Eller takes you with him, holds you in an alternate reality and keeps you there. He's much more disciplined about maintaining his world than Langhorne Slim, who uses traditional instruments but makes no references to 19th century politics or 1920s celebrity kidnappings. Even when Eller allows contemporary images to slip in, as with the 2004 election reference on the excellent opener "Taking Up Serpents Again", he couches them in mystically rural images and magically old-fashioned settings. There's an intensity, a focus, a concentrated vision that permeates all the cuts on this odd, very compelling album. It's like a movie whose premise is unbelievable, but whose execution is so good that you believe it anyway.

Eller, who has worked with similarly eccentric Thomas Truax, is a very accomplished musician and songwriter, crafting eloquently simple melodies and embedding them in sparse instrumentation. He is accompanied on various tracks by accordionist Marilee Eitner, upright bass player Joseph DeJarnette, tuba-ist Joe Exley ("Coney Island Blue"), pianist and lap steel guitarist Gary Langol and drummer Chris Moore (whose Figurines we reviewed a few months ago). The music has a restrained intensity, like a New Orleans funeral band just about to round the curve from dirge to Dixieland. There's a mournfulness in songs like "Stephen Foster" and "Taking Up Serpents" that seems just about to burst into euphoria, and a sadness lurking in bar-room stompers like "Sugar in My Coffin". They're the kind of contradictions that make Eller's sobriquet -- New York's angriest yodelling banjo player -- make perfect sense.

If circus clowns scare you a little, if nostalgia makes you worry about the future, if funeral music inevitably cheers you up, you might be ready for the fascinating and self-contained world that Eller has created here.