The first few seconds of "The Soundtrack To My Minneapolis" show exactly where Stook, nee Joshua Stuckey, is headed. Immediately after pressing play, you're awash in the sparkling organ and steady beat of "When It All Comes Crashing Down." The song storms ahead into the well-worn, but well-loved, territory of personal setback and disappointment.

Overall, this record longs for the yesteryear of "Casino Queen"-era Wilco – and why not? Though times have rejected "alt-country" for things much hipper, Stook took the best of the genre, along with rock 'n' roll – his voice recalls the raucousness of Steve Earle and Paul Westerberg – and created a dusty Midwestern landscape all his own.

This sound lends the record's title a pinch of irony; though songs like "Deliverance From Your Eyes" sound like Golden Smog, the disc as a whole is a little more country than the Twin Cities will ever be. "In my Minneapolis," Stook seems to be saying, "The Replacements wear cowboy hats." As revisionist history, that doesn't sound appealing, but Stook pulls it off.

The sequencing of the record is a little awkward – quieter tracks like "22nd Street," for example, would sit more comfortably in the disc's middle – but as openers and closers, respectively, "When It All Comes Crashing Down" and "A Song Is More Than Just A Song," more than do the job. The former doesn't give us time to resist and the latter provides a boisterous sing-along reminding that, despite its tossed-off exterior, this music is full of all sorts of cities. DB

www.stookmusic.com