Like Wilco, the Old 97's were sliding away from their alt-country roots and towards being a standard rock band with each successive album. Unlike Wilco, though, they've had a road to Damascus (or is it Denton?) experience and turned back towards their roots. The result is Drag It Up, their first album in three years. They eschew the strong and slick pop of Satellite Rides and the transitional sound of Fight Songs for country shuffle and heartbreak lyrics.

Every Old 97's album has one song that, in another reality, spent a month at #1 on the Hot 100 and blasted out of stereos all summer (e.g. "King Of All The World," "Jagged,"). The leadoff track, "Won't Be Home," is this album's pop dream. Ken Bethea and Phil Peeples machine-gun their way through the song, Bethea's guitar mournful and angry, Peeples' snare sounding like a Saturday night in Baghdad. Rhett Miller comes in media res with his minor-key heartbreak. It's every bad breakup you've had, only a lot faster. By the time the refrain kicks in, you have more pop hooks in your mouth than a 50 lb catfish in Lake Texoma, but you're singing so loud and drumming the steering wheel so hard you don't even notice.

It's a very promising start and reminder of the days when they were the "next big thing" in alt-country, but the Old 97's never seem to come close to fulfilling that promise on the remaining twelve tracks. A lot of the songs sound like demos and B-sides, jokes with filler punchlines or sonic sketches never finished. The worst offender is "Coahuila," a Tex-Mex throwaway that sounds like something Gram Parsons wrote after a beef and benzidrene burrito dinner. Rumors have circulated that some of this material is from Miller and Murry Hammond's hard-country Ranchero Brothers project, and a few songs, such as "Moonlight" and "Blinding Sheets of Rain," seem to be from that record. Still, neither song really finds a pace or place that work for it, "Rain" sounding too Burrito Brothers.

There are some beautiful moments of melancholia where the 97's come close to sounding like the band they were before they went pop. "Valium Waltz" is a glorious, spacious Texas waltz, and that leads into the sleepy and tight "In The Satellite Rides A Star." "Adelaide" is pretty, but it seems too by-the-numbers; "Bloomington" feels gimmicky when it shouldn't.

The Old 97's have struggled with Rhett Miller's surprising stardom (a la Phil Collins with Genesis, only without the bald head), and their record company at one point suggested they only wanted to keep Miller on contract and jettison the rest of the band. After three years of turmoil, they come together like a married couple dealing with infidelity. It seems like they tried hard to congeal as a band, but with a batch of reject songs and three years of seething, the best they can do is a bipolar set that shows that they still have potential but need to use it. Maybe the warning to Miller is buried in "The New Kid": Don't get carried away/You will be replaced/You will be replaced....