Continental Drifters: Better Day

Continental Drifters features one of the most unlikely lineups in recent music history: In its current form, the decade-old band contains one former child singing star (Susan Cowsill of The Cowsills), one ex-dB and auxiliary member of R.E.M. (Peter Holsapple), a Bangle (Vicki Peterson), a former member of Dream Syndicate (Mark Walton), and two ace New Orleans musicians (Russ Broussard and Robert Maché). The group's choice of rootsy, pop-inflected alt-country seems almost arbitrary, but it might be a simple matter of finding common ground: For musicians of a certain age, '60s pop and American roots music work as a lingua franca. The long-delayed domestic release of the group's second album, Vermilion, captured Continental Drifters exceeding the sum of its parts, with most members kicking in on the songwriting without disturbing the mood. With Vermilion, the band seemed on its way to becoming one of the rarest species in music: a vital supergroup. But the disjointed new Better Day doesn't deliver on that possibility, sounding less like a group effort and delivering less memorable material than its predecessors. Holsapple's contributions, for example, reveal a debt to Stax soul that his voice can't repay, and the lyrics to many tracks sound like afterthoughts. (Shouldn't the "wild horses" metaphor have been retired by now) Better Day's highlights do make it worth a listen: Peterson's "Na Na" (the title of which is taken from the chorus, of course) opens the album on a catchy note, picked up most memorably on Cowsill's sunny "Someday." But overall, what might have been a great leap forward instead proves a noticeable step back.