Roots pop redux Old 97’s resettle on an indie label BY FRANKLIN SOULTS

In an appealing, self-penned press release for Old 97’s new Drag It Up (New West), lead-guitarist Ken Bethea tells how one track, "The New Kid," came about as something of a challenge from the band’s second songwriter to its first. Just before the group were about to go on stage in their old home town of Dallas for their first gig in about two years, bassist and vocalist Murry Hammond told guitarist and vocalist Rhett Miller, "I’ve got this one song with a great melody, but I’ve only got the first line of lyrics: ‘The new kid he’s got money/The money I deserve . . . ’ Do you want to take a shot at it?" As Bethea puts it, "Rhett got that old gleam in his eye."

Bethea doesn’t mention, however, that Miller met the challenge with a sly counter-challenge, not to his long-time musical partner but to anyone who’s ever loved this truly exceptional alt-country/pop-rock band. He did it by taking Hammond’s doomy music and bitter opening line at face value, milking them for all the resentment any old-timer might feel at being displaced. "Don’t you see, I used to be the new kid!" wails the thirtysomething singer on the final product, which is buried deep on Drag It Up. It’s such a frank moment, you can’t help thinking it must reflect the band’s current status, downsized from a major label to an indie, with numerous thirtysomething life changes pulling at their seams (including Miller’s solo debut and his new kid, Max). What’s more, the song’s sourness fits the album’s overall mood as neatly as a cigarette fits nicotine-stained fingers. There are a few moments of respite, but mostly Drag It Up drags Old 97’s back to their alt-country roots with ragged, downbeat doggedness. So it’s hard not to see "The New Kid" as the disc’s statement of purpose. Which, consciously or not, is exactly what Miller is daring you to do.

Reached by phone at his new home in the lower Hudson Valley a week before leaving on a tour that brings Old 97’s to Avalon this Wednesday, Miller insists he’s being heartfelt but not autobiographical. "I don’t feel like the new kid being pushed out of the way by some younger generation. Just because I’ve never felt like I was on top of the heap, as it were. I always felt like I was the underdog."

That might seem a strange statement from someone who has won critical acclaim and new fans with each release. But in the course of our conversation, Miller elucidates it by suggesting that Old 97’s escaped the Age of Irony, an age epitomized by groups like Pavement. "As much as I like a lot of that music, my favorite stuff, the stuff that I emulate, is the stuff that predates that. Yes, it’s old, and it’s been commented on ad nauseam, and everybody knows that a break-up hurts. And everybody knows that love is a many-splendored thing. But, you know, it’s still true and it still happens all the time for the first time for people. And if they can keep remaking every movie under the sun since the dawn of film, I can keep writing songs about how love can be a many-splendored thing."

Some purist pockets of the rock underground have long proclaimed as much, from bleeding-heart punks who kick the irony bug in the balls to alt-country sentimentalists who take refuge from it out on grandpa’s farm. But unlike almost any other band in their educated bohemian cohort, Old 97’s stayed pure by chucking the doomed idea of purity itself, daring instead to reach for the corrupt world of pop rock, where love is a thing made of plastic. Yet on the group’s last two Elektra albums, Fight Songs and Satellite Rides, the synthesis with their alt-country origins was at once so sophisticated, biting, and far-reaching that it brooked few comparisons. Shall I compare them to a summer’s day? Or to Sweetheart of the Rodeo? How about Rubber Soul? Who else combines such keenly honed, melancholic realism with such unbounded, swelling romanticism?

Much of that achievement is due to Miller’s rare smarts and talent (he recently published his first short story, in a McSweeney’s collection that placed it "two after Rick Moody"). But give a nod as well to his band mates, who’ve stayed so close to their Texas roots. Drag It Up sacrifices that synthesis in an honorable act of deference to those members’ old-school preferences, and perhaps to a necessary moment of transition. As Miller notes, "Any band, really, that stays together and that functions as something of a democracy goes through this."

Cue that schmaltzy Four Aces hit.

Old 97’s appear this Wednesday, September 15, at Avalon, 15 Lansdowne Street in Boston, with Chuck Prophet; call (617) 931-2000.