Personnel: Eamon McLoughlin (vocals, violin); Kate York, Thad Cockrell (vocals); Kris Donegan (electric guitar); Molly Thomas (violin).

Audio Mixers: Doug Lancio; Matthew Ryan; Lex Price.

Arranger: Eamon McLoughlin.

The alt-country path has been trodden with deft skill by the boots of everyone from Steve Earle to Wilco, but can run the risk of redundancy the deeper a discography gets. Matthew Ryan is quite remarkable in that regard, as his 10th solo album finds him gracefully guiding his guitar and rugged rasp through territory somewhere between Tom Waits and Paul Westerberg. There's an uplifting quality to SILVER STATE with its occassional injection of rising piano chords and climactic strings, and the usually open, desolate spaces between riffs on genre-friendly records are supplanted with deep distortion that puts it a hair of the dog closer to alt-rock than to country.