If you're exposed to something long enough, chances are you'll lose any sentimental attachment to it. Having lived in a small rural town for much of my life, I am able to attest to the fantastic fiction Andy Griffith's Mayberry, many city people's only exposure to communal arrangements beyond city limits, represents. In prosaic fact, small-town existence is disappointingly like all life, only played on a smaller stage and with improved chances of finding a parking space.

I can also testify that contrary to a persistent cultural myth, most people who live in rural America do not listen to country music; some don't even tolerate it. Their tastes are pretty much indistinguishable from anybody else's anywhere. Not all that long ago, for an example, as I sat in a local watering hole a Buck Owens song stepped onto the jukebox, to be greeted with a chorus of jeers from the rednecks nearby.

Much of what is written about country music is twaddle. That is not to say there are no good country songs. Of course there are, and some country acts merit unreserved respect. But if you've listened to the genre all of your time on Earth, and especially if you've listened to it as something other than background noise at social gatherings (in other words, you've thought about it), you tend not to get excited at the very mention of "country" in the musical meaning. As a rule country recordings conform with Sturgeon's Law: like most stuff, they are mostly crap.

Country is strikingly formulaic even as popular music goes. Its narrow focus wore me out long ago, even as paradoxically I can still abide (if it's done well) the basic plot of what's called "traditional country." With the occasional notable exception, that can be reduced to two elements: (1) breaking up and (2) drinking. Perhaps the genre's capacity to recycle such a skeletal plot device is its outstanding achievement (maybe it is), or else we came long ago not to expect anything more than that. Some people have no trouble with it, and God bless 'em. But in my own experience, I have found that if you pay such content too much attention, it can drive you nuts and leave you fleeing down the road.

Though I am a fan of Colter Wall -- most of his albums hold honored places in my collection, and I have reviewed some in this space -- Memories & Empties, while certainly not bad, fails to excite me. Months ago, when I read that his next album (this one) would be pure country, I recalled the experience of fellow Canadian Ian Tyson. When Tyson left folk (as the Ian of the once-popular Ian & Sylvia) to become a solo country singer in the 1970s, the results could bore one into a coma. He regained his voice in the early 1980s when he started releasing brilliantly crafted albums in a folk-ballad style, with believable tales set in modern Rocky Mountain towns, farms and ranches. He became famous in the cowboy-culture community, and well beyond. As an Alberta-based rancher, he sang with unique conviction and authenticity.

Wall grew up in Saskatchewan, where he also ranches. His father was premier of Saskatchewan for a time, so one imagines his was not a stereotypically hard-scrabble struggle. Still, he knows how to be a cowboy.

Except for shared musical influences neither Tyson nor Wall would be mistaken for the other. Before misfortune caused his voice to go out, Tyson was known for his appealing light baritone. Wall's vocals sometimes could be mistaken for what one would expect from a frog with a bad cold. Each voice, though, is lovable in its way. The last track of the present disc honors Tyson with a cover of "Summer Wages," arguably everybody's favorite Tyson number before or after "Four Strong Winds."

It's entirely possible that if honkytonk's tropes haven't exhausted you, you will enjoy this album more than I do. Memories & Empties generates the sort of uneasiness I feel as a reviewer. Here it's the tension between what I like or dislike and what some other reviewer would make, such as the opposite, of the same materials. I guess I am drawn to songs that surprise me. On this disc a perfectly capable artist seems, temporarily I hope, to have run out of narrative. For Wall, in my opinion, country works better as an influence than as an identity.