By the time Blue Rodeo had gotten into the studio to record 1990’s Casino, the Toronto band was already well on its way to becoming a household name in Canada. But even at home, the quintet—co-fronted by singer-songwriters Jim Cuddy and Greg Keelor, and hatched from the same fertile ’80s roots-rock underground that also birthed Cowboy Junkies, Skydiggers, and the late, great Handsome Ned—was still an outlier. It had scored a genuine indie sleeper hit with its 1987 debut, Outskirts, on the back of the indelible Cuddy ballad “Try,” and subsequently managed to hang on to a mainstream audience while getting considerably weirder on 1989’s Diamond Mine. But conventional Canadian music industry wisdom has always dictated that you haven't really made it until you’ve made it in the States. So it was time for Blue Rodeo to make it in the States. Under the direction of new US manager Danny Goldberg—who would shepherd Nirvana’s Nevermind into existence just 10 months later and change the game entirely—Blue Rodeo thus decamped to Los Angeles to record its third LP with producer Pete Anderson (who had helped Dwight Yoakam make successful inroads from his country background toward a more pop audience). And they went for it. “Everything he put on the record, he thought was a single,” Keelor said of Anderson in Maclean’s magazine in 2012. “He didn’t want any sort of filler.” The sessions didn’t quite yield the hoped-for cross-border crossover smash that might have positioned Blue Rodeo as Wilco a half-decade before Wilco had actually taken shape. But what you hear on Casino is as pure a distillation of the idiosyncratic Cuddy/Keelor songwriting partnership and the early Blue Rodeo lineup’s road-hardened versatility as you’ll ever get. There are indeed singles, of course: “Til I Am Myself Again” establishes itself as a bright, Byrds-like evergreen well before it reaches the first chorus—and has since woven itself into the permanent Canadiana canon, alongside the Everlys-meet-Beatles sparkler “What Am I Doing Here” and the snaky, slightly noir-ish “Trust Yourself.” Between those hits, though, Blue Rodeo wasn’t exactly slacking. “Montréal” and the long-fused “After the Rain” are the kind of countrified softies Cuddy could likely write in his sleep, but, boy, did he have his hurtin’ thing nailed down from the get-go. Keelor’s penchants for off-kilter chord changes and psychedelic textures subtly intrude upon “Last Laugh,” meanwhile, to remind us why Blue Rodeo has always been more interesting than they can outwardly seem. Likewise, “Two Tongues” and “Time” catch the band cutting loose with a Let It Be rock ’n’ roll vibe that betrays the hours they put in playing dirty small-town bars before anyone even thought of applying Casino’s coat of polish. As for choosing to conclude their big “commercial” record with the rockabilly hoedown “You’re Everywhere”? Sometimes you’ve just gotta be the best version of yourself.