I first saw John Fullbright play a show in Okemah, Oklahoma, at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in 2010. I was impressed with what he managed to do with just an acoustic guitar and his voice, and waited patiently for a studio album from the man. It finally arrived a few weeks ago: From the Ground Up.

Interestingly, the album sounds exactly like what I thought John Fullbright with a fuller arrangement would sound like: the drums kick in just where I thought they would, the electric guitars and steel guitars drop in fills exactly where you would expect them, and the piano and organ parts help fill out the sound. This predictability is both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, the music’s pretty good, the instruments are played well and fit the tone and mood of the music perfectly, and everything really sounds like it should. On the other hand, it means there’s not really much in the way of exciting revelations or real surprises. Songs play out just like you think they would.

When Fullbright is uptempo or just uses a full arrangement, the songs are catchy and oftentimes downright fun. It’s hard not to sing along with “Moving” or “Jericho,” both of which I recognized from the live show I caught and from his live album (released a couple of years ago). Fullbright’s voice seems more controlled and nuanced in the studio recordings than live, which is to be expected, but some of the raw energy from his live performance has been lost (also expected, as that’s usually what happens when you go from live to studio, right?).

Unfortunately, when the arrangements become sparser and quieter, I tended to lose interest. It’s not that the songs are bad, mind you: “I Only Pray at Night” is a decent if rather unexceptional piano ballad, and “Forgotten Flowers” is a lovelorn finger-plucker that bears a close resemblance to its live version. It’s just that, after the sandpaper-throated rave of songs like “Gawd Above” and the sly “Satan and St. Paul,” the quieter moments are just a bit of a let-down, both stylistically and thematically. Most of the quieter songs are more traditional love song fare, and while that’s all well and good, it’s not Fullbright’s area of strength. He really excels with the more philosophical tunes, such as the aforementioned “Satan and St. Paul,” which feels exactly as apocalyptic as the title suggests it should, or the relationship as viewed through a biblical metaphor of “Jericho.” The quiet songs are just too straightforward for someone with as good a turn of phrase as Fullbright.

From the Ground Up is by no means a bad album. Sure, Fullbright’s not the next Woody Guthrie (more a hometown hero than a thematic or stylistic one, as both Guthrie and Fullbright hale from the bustling metropolis that is Okemah, OK), but he’s a solid musician with some impressive skills and a good ear for a tune. He has some clever phrasings (“Outside it’s raining fire/But I think I’ll go to bed/’Cause there ain’t much you can do/When it falls down on your head,” from “Satan and St. Paul”), and he definitely has a career ahead of him that I’ll watch with interest. This is a good album. Not great, but a damn-sight better than most of the crap you encounter nowadays.