The Waifs have an interesting back story, about months and years spent travelling the byways of their native Australia, playing in bars and on the streets, honing their skills, instrumental, vocal and songwriting. That hard apprenticeship accounts for the strength of their debut album.

The Waifs are sisters Vikki and Donna Simpson, who play guitars and sing (Vikki also blows a mean harp), and their pal Joshua Cunningham on vocals, guitar, mandolin, uke and dobro. Of the dozen tracks here, Vikki wrote two, and the rest come from the pens of Josh and Donna.

Although the record company has printed "File under pop" on the back cover, this is pure folk-rock, Australian style. At its best, like the opening track, Donna's "Fisherman's Daughter," this music fairly breathes with the essence of hot, dusty Australian spaces, with lazy dobro and six-string acoustic lines winding around each other behind Donna's throaty, sexy vocals and Vikki's higher, sweeter harmonies. This one's something of a personal statement, one suspects: "I'm a country girl in a city whirlpool / I'm pullin' over gonna let you through / I'm living in the left hand lane of my city / slow down so I can walk this highway with you."

Vikki follows with her "Nothing New," an Antipodean answer to the Be Good Tanyas' sound, languid country-folk that's sunny and sad at the same time, blending personal and social comment: "We live through this day after day / complacency's a curse / but you just can't escape it."

Joshua Cunningham provides some of the thematic glue that holds the album together. His "Lighthouse," with Vikki on lead vocals, is a plea for either spiritual enlightenment or actual light to find a way home; perhaps both. "Lighthouse man can't help us all / Some are saved and some will fall . . . he'll light your way but that is all / Steer your own ship back to shore." This one has a more upbeat, rocking rhythm and lots of nice fingerpicked guitar and mandolin picking, plus some lovely harmony from the sisters. The lighthouse motif is used extensively in the album artwork, as well. Josh himself sings "Flesh and Blood," a dark and bluesy declaration of anti-celebrity: "Flesh and blood and skin and bone / what's mine is mine is mine alone."

Folk musicians of all ages fight the battle of the road and the toll it takes on their lives, and there's plenty of that here: Donna's "London Still" is a lightly jazzy take on the theme with some evocative lines: "I miss you like my left arm / that's been lost in a war." In "Highway One" she waxes poetic about her home place and extends a welcome to friend and lover. Josh waxes similarly nostalgic for his hometown in "Since I've Been Around," and finds beauty in the small gesture of a flower-filled window box on a city street in "Fourth Floor."

Though the trio is unafraid to find the still moments in a song, they can also cut loose and rock, as they do in the honky-tonker "Three Down," this one inspired by playing the joints and halls of Austin and Nashville and points in between. The album ends on a slow, quiet note, though: Josh's "Up All Night." It's a watching-the-sun-come-up-while-I-think-about-you love song with some beautiful dobro work from guest Ben Franz. Mr. Cunningham may seem too young to be singing lines like these, but he pulls it off: "We were young long ago / now there's ash where the fire glowed / cold and grey, black as night / I'm waiting for the morning light."

Fans of sibling harmony and contemporary folk-rock will find a lot to like in The Waifs' music, and can learn more at their Web site.