There are flashier singer-songwriters than Rhett Miller. But are there better ones? On his fifth solo album, the alt-country stalwart delivers 13 sharp, shapely roots-rock songs, with flashes of surf rock and Brill Building pop surfacing amid the usual twang. As frontman of the Old 97's, Miller always sounded like an old soul; now, at 41, he wears his hard-won wisdom like a pair of old jeans.

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“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”