REVIEW: Rhett Miller "The Believer"

Rating: 3.5

The Believer is Miller's disappointing second solo effort following up The Instigator, a glib and wholey unecessary little album still littering a dollar bin near you.  As frontman for the consistently good Old 97's Miller is the pretty face of a chugging workhorse.  His clear tenor balances the band's loose southern grit and single handedly stitches the the "alt" in front of their country.  On his own, however, Miller opts for a more refined sound lush with pop sentimentality and power chords.  All the interesting rough edges have been polished away leaving a smooth, transparent veneer through which a stream of largely trite adolescent romance-babble is sung with utter earnestness.  This is all bleeding sleeves and broken hearts with a faux literate word count tipping the lyrics to music ratio dangerously out of balance.  Still, don't feel too bad for the guy, it's better than his first solo disc for its arrangements, he's got a steady day job with Old 97's and I hear he's married to a model.