The Waco Brothers, alterative-country music's toughest, thirstiest band, put on a wildly rocking show that made Sunday night at the Southgate House feel like, well, Saturday night at the Southgate House.

        Unlike their first two Tristate shows, this one didn't last as long. It was the final stop in the Chicago-based band's 10-night tour of the Southeast, and they were headed home on the highway immediately afterward. But they managed to jam 21 songs into 80 minutes for a set that began with the audience seated calmly at tables and ended with half the room up and dancing.

        The six-man band, a collection of Chicagoans and Englishmen formed from such bands as the Mekons, KMFDM, and Jesus Jones, performed a mix of country covers rendered in punk and rock 'n' roll speed, as well as material from their five Bloodshot Records releases. Their original songs are country in the tradition of Merle Haggard - songs for the powerless, songs for the working man, songs for America's and capitalism's losers.

        Versions of “Nine Pound Hammer,” ""Wreck on the Highway” and ""Big River” were great, but some of their own compositions stand alongside those classics. The title of singer Jon Langford's ""Walking on Hell's Roof Looking at the Flowers” poetically summed up a Haggard-esque vision, and if that didn't do it the first line did: “"History is written by the winner, this is a loser's song.”

        The messages hit home, if only because of the band's humor and power. Noting Saturday's presidential inauguration, Mr. Langford joked that the show would be the band's last until 2005; he'd be locked in his apartment for the next four years listening to Clash records and only recognizing Chicago mayor Richard Daley as his true leader.

        Not all was political. As a pure rock group, there isn't a more energized bar band going. Two songs in, they were punctuating the big beats of “Out There A Ways” with Rockettes-style leg kicks, executed with boozy precision. It proved a successful way of loosening up a Sunday night Cincinnati crowd.

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