It is the time of outdoor concerts, and if it isn’t sweltering and the commando mosquitoes aren’t raiding, few things are more relaxing than live tunes in the open air.

Especially with a few beers inside you, which, coincidentally enough, is the best way to let the blue-collar rabble-rousing of Lucero help disarm your inhibitions.

Here is my Minnpost preview of the band’s gig at the Varsity last October. Not a lot has changed in the intervening nine months. The show was taut and loose in all the right places, with Ben Nichols rasping insights and the group by turns ragged and resplendent. Perhaps abetted by powerful live versions of over half its tunes, Lucero’s then-new album, “1372 Overton Park,” demonstrated enough extraordinary staying power to land on my Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll list of the year’s best records when I voted in February.

“Overton Park” was both Lucero’s major-label debut and the first time the band deployed a horn section as a pervasive part of its sound. It was a sensible move for a Memphis-based group that had come close to perfecting the indie-rock one-two punch of instrumental snarl and lyrical bittersweetness. The horns not only fattened the mix but buffed up the mood with a nuance that leavened the classic rant or wistful interlude that can so easily become a cliché.

Here is the group playing "South By Southwest" this year without the horns, and here they are at the same festival in the cold outdoors with the horns along.

Here is a good example of how the horns enhance the band, on the burning ballad, “Goodbye Again,” from a performance in Columbus back in April.

The Varsity was packed with revelers last October, and although I suspect the zoo faithful to be more genteel in this tonier, suburban setting, the group has amassed a die-hard following that won’t have to go to work the next morning. The concessions should be busy.

The opener is noteworthy — Jason Isbell and his group the 400 Unit. Isbell earned his spurs as one of the three lead singer-songwriters in the Drive-By Truckers and has put out a pair of well-received solo records since 2007. They remind me of a slightly tougher version of '80s So-Cal rock, along the lines of The Eagles and Jackson Browne, and a creative step back from his best stuff with the Truckers. But it is a quality opening act nonetheless, and besides, I’m there for the headliner.  

If Isbell and the Unit can capture lightning in a bottle the way they do here on a rendition of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” in Athens, Georgia, last spring, so much the better.

Lucero and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, at the Weesner Amphitheter of the Minnesota Zoo, Saturday, July 31, 7:30 p.m.; tickets $26.