You wake up to carry in the new day," sings Jay Farrar on the opening track of Wide Swing Tremolo, Son Volt's third album. It's an appropriate beginning for a CD that finds the alt-country band moving away from the bedraggled sorrow of its second album, Straightaways. Farrar, guitarist Dave Boquist, bassist Jim Boquist and drummer Mike Heidorn have learned to celebrate emotional depth rather than drown in it. "Never had a fall that didn't burn with laughter," Farrar admits in "Driving the View." In other songs, such as "Flow," "Dead Man's Clothes" and "Right On Through," he grapples with lyrical visions of death and emerges hopeful of "a new beginning."

Where their debut, Trace, leaned heavily toward country & western stylings and Straightaways toward jagged rock riffing, Wide Swing Tremolo offers a broader and more balanced palette. Its fourteen tracks range easily from the Southern-fried folk rock of "Question" to the pedal steel twang of "Hanging Blue Side" and the hushed strings of "Chanty."

Farrar ends Wide Swing Tremolo with the bittersweet – but by no means ironic – observation that we're all just "living on blind hope." Along with his opening line, it makes a fitting bookend for an album that stretches toward some kind of peace – if not quiet. (RS 798)

NEVA CHONIN