Every incipient music movement promises to improve on the status quo. A few years ago, when alternative-country or "Americana" erupted, the rebel genre exemplified by Wilco, Son Volt and others was hailed for its lack of affectation, its front-porch plainness. Integrating the earnestness of country and roots music with the rash impulses of rock, its proponents discovered a vital, largely cliche-free means of expression that clicked with those burned out on rock-and-roll posturing.

There were endearing little songs celebrating pie. Sweeping narratives of modern wanderlust. Pieces that recast the folklore of the prairie and antebellum South in terms even someone who flunked American history could understand.

But, as any longtime observer of pop can tell you, that euphoric early burst of creativity rarely lasts. Inevitably, the alt-country world has been plagued by lazy songwriting and the lyrical shortcuts (if I hear one more song about escape from a dead-end town . . .) its pioneers were trying to subvert.

Two of the genre's most imaginative writers - Ryan Adams, the former leader of Whiskeytown, and David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower - returned to the woodshed, and their new efforts signal a turning point for the genre. Both draw on expected images, utilize familiar story lines, and traffic in the tropes that have choked others. Re-purposing these cliches, they emerge with provocative, highly individual music more concerned with reflection than the typical alt-country hell-raising Saturday night.

[... skipping the Ryan Adams review ...]

Where Adams nudges his songs away from the ordinary by tweaking the familiar, 16 Horsepower, the Denver quartet whose previous work has a distinctly religious tone, attempts something more radical with the riveting song cycle Secret South (Razor & Tie ****). The band's fourth album is the rare masterpiece that gathers up the worn-out images of others and wrings something completely different from them. Among its lyrical conceits are discussions of transgression ("give my conscience a pounding"), the wrath of a God who will "tear you asunder," the pursuit of illicit pleasure, the vanishing American spirit, and the psychic scars of slavery.

It takes a while to divine those themes, though, because they're wrapped up in knotted clusters of guitars and a thick atmospheric fog. Secret South is the far-off sound of a revival tent heard through the night mist, of preachers breathing fire and brimstone and musicians pounding away until all souls are saved. It's less a series of songs than an extended meditation on the role of faith in ordinary life, faith that can be tyrannical or comforting, that blinds some and sets others free.

Edwards, whose grandfather was a minister and father was a Hell's Angel, is cagey about the specifics of his narratives. He says the themes come from events in his family history, and though they weren't "crazy," they are "things I wouldn't outright talk about. They don't need to be spoken directly, but they do need to be spoken about." He adds that he considers the South less a place than a mind-set: "It's more in a way of thinking and believing. . . . They've learned to say no to progress, to pleasure, to most of the things we worry about."

Rather than make his points head-on, Edwards, 32, offers his observations in "a shrouded manner," and shrouded is the perfect description of Secret South: Its compositions begin with lumbering drones, guitars that roar like heavy-metal thunder and move in deliberate slow motion, tracing wide arcs through the mix. The hooks, often buried under layers of murk, are somber - refrains borrowed from the hymnal rather than the pop songbook.

But those hooks acquire haunting power as songs such as "Cinderalley" and "Burning Bush" unfold. Edwards isn't interested in a happily-ever-after conclusion; he's wrestling with his own beliefs, seeking perspective on actions and their consequences, if not the meaning of it all. He's not preaching, not even issuing the stern warning of a believer. Rather, in his own works and covers of the traditional "Wayfaring Stranger" and Dylan's "Nobody 'Cept You," he bellows with conviction and doubt, recasting enduring seeker-on-the-path bromides in compelling new ways.