I had heard of Ryan Bingham before I encountered him in the guise of a character on the blockbuster neo-Western television series Yellowstone. He was hard to ignore, since he provided most of the accompanying music on solo acoustic guitar. The songs were mostly his own, and they were decent enough.

Somewhere in my CD collection, however, lies a Bingham album that made little impression on me the last time I listened to it, which was within an hour or two of purchase. They Call Us the Lucky Ones, which may or may not be an improvement on the earlier one, drags up assorted feelings. Basically a rock record, at this stage of my exposure to the genre it brings to mind a whole lot of stuff to which I've been exposed over time and which enters my ears, shall we say, absent the joy of discovery. It's recognizably out of the subgenre country-rock, which last engaged me when the Byrds -- so legend attests -- founded the genre, with the release of Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1968. Contrary to its reputation, though, Sweetheart is devoid of rock.

Sweetheart remains distinctive for many reasons, in good part because it was grounded in a kind of creative traditionalism courtesy of celebrated rock musicians Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons, who drew on previous immersion in honkytonk, folk, bluegrass and gospel. Sweetheart's songs, brilliantly chosen and performed, covered other artists from the Louvin Brothers to Woody Guthrie. Everything worked (and still does), in other words, and none of it is refurbished for rock arrangement.

No doubt, in an age that demands original material and typically eschews "covers" (a music-industry term meant to carry a whiff or more of patronization), a Sweetheart equivalent could not be cut today as anything other than a low-budget vanity project. If Lucky Ones is broadly identifiable as "country," it mostly doesn't sound all that rootsy. I don't know what Bingham listens to in his off time, but from the evidence in these grooves I'm reasonably confident that it's not the kind of music I review here.

Not all cuts assault listeners with gale-force electrical torrents. Enough do, however, to frustrate any other expectation of what Bingham and associates seek to accomplish, such as the shaping of an art influenced (though not necessarily defined) by an American sound traceable to something on the other side of the pre-latter 1960s. Since those days, rock has functioned in significant part as an endless loop that seeks to hold a captive and generally undemanding audience.

Let me be fair to all: if you like this sort of thing, you'll like this thing, and may God bless you.