Howlin Rain open their covers album Watermelon with Chris Robinson on Silver Paper

Howlin Rain have opened their twentieth anniversary with a cover nobody was expecting: Mountain's Silver Paper, from the 1970 album Climbing!, with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes singing it. The track is the first release from Watermelon, a covers record due on 13 November through Silver Current Records.

The brief Ethan Miller set himself was to avoid the obvious. Rather than build a covers album out of songs everyone already loves, he went hunting in the less travelled corners of the decade, pulling material he has described as esoteric and sometimes from artists most listeners would have to go and look up. Miller called the result a historical and musical jigsaw puzzle, and said what holds it together is that these underground rabbit holes all turned out to connect to each other.

The names he mined bear that out. Judee Sill, Sugluk, Moby Grape, Fairport Convention, Todd Rundgren, Scott Walker, Tim Hardin and Mountain Bus are the artists JamBase lists, which is a spread running from a Canadian Inuit rock band to a Californian songwriter who was largely lost for thirty years before reissue culture found her again. The nine-song tracklist opens with Silver Paper and takes in Jesus Was A Cross Maker, Fall Away, I Am Not Willing, Possibly Parsons Green, Black Maria, 30th Century Man, If I Were A Carpenter and Rosali.

Miller's account of how Silver Paper got on the record is the most human thing in the announcement. He remembers standing over a record player in the desert with Robinson at some ungodly hour of the night, drinks in hand, playing Climbing! at high volume. Of everything that goes past over twenty years of a friendship, he said, that one has stayed. He describes the cover as "a dedication and manifestation of that fine, fleeting moment."

Howlin Rain has always been a band Miller reassembles rather than maintains, and Watermelon comes with another new cast. Keyboardist Jonny Niemann, guitarist and vocalist Jason Soda and bassist and vocalist Kyre Wilcox come in; drummer Justin Smith is the only player carried over from the last couple of lineups. For a group whose identity has mostly lived in Miller's voice and songwriting, a covers record made with a fresh rhythm section is a reasonable way to introduce one.

The guest list is small and pointed. Ty Segall appears on 30th Century Man, David Nance on Possibly Parsons Green, and Robinson turns up a second time on Rundgren's Black Maria. All three are players from roughly the same West Coast and Midwest orbit Miller has worked in since Comets on Fire, so the album reads less like a celebrity covers project and more like a circle of people who have been trading records for decades finally putting them on tape.

Covers albums are having a moment in rock generally: Wolf Alice recently took on the Roches' Hammond Song for a B-sides EP, and Haruomi Hosono went back to the Moonglows' Sincerely at eighty. Watermelon is the version of that instinct that comes with footnotes rather than nostalgia.

JamBase does not say whether any live dates are attached to the twentieth anniversary. Release dates for Watermelon and the rest of the autumn are listed on the release calendar.