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*** The V-Roys

ARE YOU THROUGH YET?

(E-Squared)

After becoming the first band signed to Steve Earle’s label, Knoxville’s V-Roys have decided to hang it up, and this live disc is a tting swan song, showcasing the bar band’s scorching, no-frills crowd pleasers and some well-chosen covers. The disc starts off with a version of Neil Young’s “Motion Pictures” that supplants the original’s drawling vocals and sparse instrumentation with Scott Miller’s emotive voice and a roiling sea of tom-toms and fuzzed-out guitar. The V-Roys also countrify the La’s’ “There She Goes”; this version retains the original’s infectious charm, but Miller can’t always hit Lee Mavers’s high notes, and the song works much better as crystalline Brit-pop than as nicotine-stained honk. The Replacements’ “I.O.U.” flat-out rocks. But so did the original, and the V-Roys do little to alter or improve on it.

The band’s own songs, on the other hand, are gems: tightly played but ragged tales of girls lost and girls found, lung cancer and Appalachian mountaintops, alternating between four-on-the-floor melodic assaults (“Sooner or Later,” “Wind Down”) and tunes that burn slow like a Marlboro 100 (“Sorry Sue,” “Virginia Way”). Sadly for the rabid crowd that’s audible at the album’s end, this one finally made it down to the filter.

— Mike Miliard