In the eight years since the Allman Brothers pioneered and commercially institutionalized the Southern rock style, a large posse of cowboy-hatted rockers have ridden the same trail to success. Twin guitars and drums weren't always the ticket, and the best of them specialized in various areas of Southern rock's stylistic mixture of rock, country, and rhythm & blues, but the basic assumption of the performances and particularly of the songwriting was that the style was one to be polished more than extended. It was seemingly impossible to equal the natural combustion of the first three Allman Brothers albums, and the Allmans' slow death almost perversely seemed to illustrate the point.

While the post-Brothers debuts of Dickey Betts and Sea Level don't exactly bust the chains, Betts regains the relaxed feel that was absent in his later work with the Brothers, and Sea Level displays a fiery instrumental combination that recalls the Allmans at their improvisatory best.

In retrospect, the failure of the Allmans to fully integrate Chuck Leavell's keyboards might have been their fatal mistake: his open-ended playing in Sea Level shows that he could have taken up more of the instrumental slack left after Duane's death. As it was, Leavell was left bolstering the blues boogie instead of battling Betts' guitar for the spotlight, but his ears were clearly wide open. His new instrumental compositions are fluid pieces of jazzy rock that recall Betts' best work by the ease with which solos and harmonic riffs are welded to the tunes.

While Leavell's playing won't scare many jazz pianists into the woodshed, his solos and ensemble playing with guitarist Jimmy Nalls give his tunes and improvisations a verve lacking in many fusion records. And while all Southern rock is in a sense fusion music, Sea Level is the first to reach toward incorporating jazz styles into the mix.

Clearly, instrumentals are the meat of Sea Level's debut; the vocals are hopelessly mediocre. Leavell sings them in a voice that owes debts to Gregg Allman and Leon Russell, while failing to equal or transcend his models. Either a singer should be recruited to bolster Sea Level or they should pack away their public address system. But as debuts go, this is a promising album, and the most inventive to come out of the South in some time.

Dickey Betts introduces his Great Southern band less ambitiously: with twin guitars and drums, the instrumentation mirrors the Allmans; and the songs similarly fit within the familiar mold. Thus, while the playing is as solid as the compositions, there is little surprising here beyond the fact that Betts has moved toward a more rock-oriented style than his earlier country experiments might indicate. "Nothing You Can Do" is pumped along by a muddy rhythm guitar, and throughout the album the guitar exchanges between Betts and Dan Toler display a cohesion that falls just short of fireworks.

For now, though, Great Southern is more polish than inspiration, and Betts' new songs do nothing to break out of the inevitable Allman Brothers comparisons. The stately harmonic guitars of "The Way Love Goes" have a "Blue Sky" feel while the lead guitar introduction of "California Blues" could have come from any number of Southern rock standards—which is precisely the problem. While Betts' band can't be faulted for execution and has firmly established itself as heir apparent to the Allman Brothers (who didn't make an album this good after Brothers and Sisters), Great Southern is sorely lacking in terms of stylistic advances. It might be unfair to fault Betts for relying on a style that he helped create, but it would be disrespectful to a musician of his caliber not to expect more. (RS 241)

JOHN MILWARD