Ride Out

Often, Seger sticks strictly to his wheelhouse -- a charging rendition of John Hiatt's "Detroit Made" is textbook Seger, from its fist-pumping chorus to its rapturous odes to bucket seats -- but he's just as likely to veer into gutbucket blues (the hard-hitting "Hey Gypsy," his best original here) or country story-telling (Steve Earle's "The Devil's Right Hand" and Kasey Chambers' "Adam and Eve," the two best covers here). Unfortunately, this light restlessness is somewhat undone by Seger's surprisingly chintzy self-production, which alternates between anonymous gloss and constrictive sequenced synthesizers, the latter reaching a tacky peak on the stilted title track where a four-on-the-floor drum loop vies for attention with canned electronic horns. Other stumbles can be found, such as the well-intentioned and mercilessly literal pro-environmental anthem "It's Your World" ("Let's talk about mining in Wisconsin/Let's talk about breathing in Beijing"), and while there's some charm in the fact that Seger is loose enough to keep his ends untied, Ride Out is hobbled by that exacting production: conceptually, it's something of a ragged mess and it'd benefit from sounding like one.