Rhett Miller / Eef Barzelay

Rhett Miller's 2002 solo album The Instigator was sharper, wittier, catchier, and rockier than the work he'd been doing around that time with his band Old 97's, but fans of the record worried when Miller followed it up with yet another hit-and-miss Old 97's effort, and the first couple of spins through his overly fussy new solo album The Believer won't do much to quiet fears that at best, he's streaky. Given time, though, The Believer blooms. Producer George Drakoulias takes a Beatles-esque approach, adding strings, piano, and guitar effects. That robs some songs of their immediacy, but his fillips make slighter tracks like "I Believe She's Lying" and "Meteor Shower" sound fuller, and his layers of sound can't muffle the timeless hooks and seamless wordplay of "Help Me, Suzanne," "Fireflies," and the steady-building title track. More importantly, the starry sparkle serves a purpose, connecting a set of songs about how the petty concerns of lovers still matter, even when the world's in turmoil. As Miller puts it on the album's opening song, "Sex in wartime is sweeter than peace / It's the one sweet thing about war."

Miller's alt-country contemporary Eef Barzelay takes his own step away from the rock-band format on the solo album Bitter Honey, a set of acoustic songs that don't sound markedly different from his work with Clem Snide, except that they seem to be missing something. The songs themselves are fine, bordering on terrific—especially the creepily sensual "Thanksgiving Waves," the friend-skewering "Well," and the brisk love poem "Little Red Dot"—but it isn't hard to imagine how much better they'd be had Barzelay called in his bandmates to flesh them out. (And it's not like Clem Snide's genteel style would've fundamentally altered these songs' fragile honesty.) Still, sometimes the stripped-down sound works better, as on "The Ballad Of Bitter Honey," about the self-delusions of a rap-video hoochie. The stark setting suits a sardonic tale of a callous wannabe celebrity who's figured out how to use her curves to get what she wants. The song's stinger line is chilling: "Don't hate me because I know just what this world is all about."