Jay Farrar had a fair run with the original lineup of Son Volt, which emerged from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo as one of the first commercially viable alt-country bands. Then the band's sound became creatively stifling, so Farrar dismissed his sidemen and went solo for a couple of adventurous but only intermittently successful records. Now he's revived the name Son Volt for the record Okemah And The Melody Of Riot, which adds a new set of players and some subtle stylistic advances. Farrar has always been inclined to shake up his twangy roots-rock with odd time signatures and song structures. On Okemah, he starts with a basic framework of riff-verse-chorus-solo-repeat, then diddles a little—as on "Afterglow 61" and "Jet Pilot," where the packed-in lyrics spill over the measure and off the beat. Their feeling of urgency has been missing from Farrar's work over the past couple of years: the sense that these songs mean so much that he had to get them out quick, without a lot of fuss.