Tomorrowland

One might expect that winning a GRAMMY™ and an Oscar (for his song "The Weary Kind" from the film Crazy Heart, cowritten with producer T-Bone Burnett) would catapult Ryan Bingham into a bigger spotlight. But working in a folk-country milieu isn't an easy thing to do, and getting pegged as "folk" or "country" tends to put one in a pretty tight corner. It's a shame, because fans of everyone from Wilco to Ryan Adams or even Band of Horses might appreciate Bingham's evolving music. On his fourth album, Bingham cranks up the volume—along with a fairly prominent streak of passion, or anger, or frustration. Something's lit a fire here! He comes across as the leader of a rough-and-tumble bar band, someone who's crawled across the desert, thirsty and hungry with an ax to grind. "Guess Who's Knocking" surges and thumps like a White Stripes tune, and Bingham's ravaged voice sounds like Paul Westerberg on the Springsteen-ish epic "Rising of the Ghetto." Some listeners here might miss Bingham's folkier side, but surely a new crowd of restless souls with rock 'n' roll in their blood will embrace the raucous Tomorrowland.