Pitchfork

Of the many bands that do the suddenly pervasive Springsteen thing better than the Killers, Memphis' Lucero are perhaps the most surprising. Not because they lack the technical or emotional range, but because they've always seemed too Southern to convincingly evoke the Jersey shore. But Lucero get around, as their heavy tour schedule and all those songs about the road attest.

"I Can Get Us Out of Here", the fourth track on their fifth album, Rebels, Rogues & Sworn Brothers, sounds like one of those throwaways from The River that was never a hit but is someone's favorite, like "Jackson Cage" or "Sherry Darling". Over Rick Steff's momentous piano chords, which drive the song just as much as Roy Berry's drums, Ben Nicholls' sings about a girl named Jenny getting drunk in a bar downtown: "Long legs use 'em and run/ Blue eyes that blind like the sun/ I might not be the one/ But that's all right." It's the promise of escape more than Steff's piano that draws the Boss comparison, suggesting that Lucero have honed and expanded their sound considerably over the years. With abrupt shifts in tempo and style and a foundation in rock lore, Lucero's brand of country rock remains unpretentious as ever. But the range and impact of Rogues, Rebels suggest the band has greater ambitions and the chops to realize them.

These songs reveal a looser Lucero, sporting not only a new collaborator in Steff, a veteran who also plays in Cat Power's band, but a few new tricks as well. Many of the same elements are in play: Berry's wily drumming, John Stubblefield's melodic low end, Nicholls' polarizing growl, and Brian Venable's earth-scoring guitar tone (did I really write that the band was better off without him?). Venable unleashes a flurry of descending notes on "San Francisco", and fires off muscle-car riffs on "The Mountain" and "Sing Me No Hymns" (the latter of which demands the noncritical description "badass"). Berry's drums sound a little too low in the mix, but he still keeps the band agile, allowing them to change directions mid-song and build dramatically on the shoulda-been-the-closer "On the Way Home". In fact, Rogues, Rebels could have been the best showcase for the band's taut dynamic yet.

Could have been. All those years on the road may have sharpened their musical attack and targeted their jams, but those same years appear to have narrowed Nicholls' songwriting, reinforcing some of his worst lyrical tendencies. Almost every song on Rebels touches on Nicholls' favorite subjects: drinking, bars, and girls. Those that don't could conceivably be set in a bar or addressed to an unmentioned woman. They're either vague and slightly pandering, like "She's Just That Kind of Girl", or specific and slightly pandering, like "Cass". The main character of the latter has "more beauty than the setting sun." Nicholls continues: "She'd dance and flirt with all the boys/ But all her beauty she would sooner destroy." The girl in the final song, "She Wakes When She Sleeps", has a similar relationship with her own good looks: "She wears a sorrow her beauty can't hide," he sings in his trademark growl. "I pray she sheds it and sleeps the whole night."

The main problem, besides the relentless repetition of theme, is that these girls are so idealized they never seem real, which perhaps is Nicholls' underlying intention. The tough, transient lifestyle of a touring band has made it so he can't get out of his own head and can't write from any other perspective than onstage. The world is fixed, but Nicholls is constantly in motion. As a result, most women remain at a sad emotional distance, hanging out after the final encore until the band packs it up and moves to the next town. Lucero plays a killer show, but you wish Nicholls would give the band something new to work with.