There are some folks down in Athens, Georgia, who think their Star Room Boys are a kind of cure-all for slapdash Americana, an honest, hard-country substitute for the irony-riddled music of other fringe alt-country bands who advertise their sources like steamer trunks covered with travel stickers. The Star Room Boys have two of the finest instrumentalists on the scene in pedal-steel man Johnny Neff and guitarist Philip McArdle, while lead vocalist Dave Marr, who founded the group in 1995 and who writes most of the material, knows how to deliver unpretentious country novellas. Still, on this sophomore disc they do not avoid all of the pitfalls of the aforementioned alt crowd: every now and then they stick their chins way out with a lyrical bent that is painfully overwrought and overwritten, and Marr"s voice can devolve into an irksome sameness. Yet when it comes to music that makes you at home at the end of the bar at the end of the night, you could do far worse than the Star Room Boys. --Henry Cabot Beck