A lot of different styles get lumped together under the umbrella of alt-country. Here are four CDs that cover a wide range: Texas country-rock, mellow country-western, country-tinged roots rock, and southern-fried rockin' gospel soul.

Radney Foster's fourth solo album lies at the pop and rock end of the alt-country music spectrum. Another Way to Go is a tuneful, mostly upbeat collection of Texas country-folk-rock that explores the joys and comforts (and occasional disappointments) of love and family life.

Foster rose to prominence as half of the duo Foster & Lloyd in the late '80s, when mainstream country was briefly open to slightly edgier acts like Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam and Lyle Lovett. His previous solo albums included two more pop-oriented mainstream country releases, and a rootsier live acoustic release in 2001.

Foster has written songs with the best in the business and is adept at telling a story in a few brief lines. He's also better than many at marrying those lyrics with a catchy tune, and there are plenty of both on Another Way to Go.

The CD keeps your attention with a good mix of musical styles, from the classic-rock anthem of the opener, "Real Fine Place to Start" to the mostly acoustic ballad "Disappointing You" to the testosterone-feuled rocker "Tired of Pretending."

Foster is solidly grounded in that other strain of southern pop music, good greasy Muscle Shoals soul, as he proves with the sweet groove of "Again," and the funky "Sure Feels Right" and "I Got What You Need." "What are We Doing Here," about taking a chance on love, is another slice of country soul that just begs for a Charlie Pride to sing it.

There just aren't enough saxophones in country music these days, and Foster sets that right with a wall of saxes in "What it is That You Do," which also has sweet backing-vocal harmonies, rollicking piano and shimmying maracas.

After a couple of quieter tracks like "Scary Old World," (co-written with the late Harlan Howard), and "Sit Still," a folky, acoustic song about slowing down and enjoying the moment, Foster lets loose one more time on the title track, a big folk-rock anthem with country accents and powerful exhortations about following your dreams: "When the world starts shovin', give it back a push."

Another Way to Go is the perfect antidote to the bland pop of mainstream country, but more tuneful than most alt-country and more rockin' than most folk.

Stewart MacDougall's Hearsay is perilously close to the bland mainstream of country-western music, despite the fact that his music is a rarity these days: piano-driven country.

MacDougall is a Canadian session musician with a couple of previous albums to his name and production credits on several others. He wears a big white cowboy hat and sports shoulder-length hair and a neatly trimmed moustache,
sings in a lovely baritone, and makes what I can only term country music for the geriatric set. If Lawrence Welk were still alive and on TV, somebody like MacDougall would be on the show.

Hearsay covers all kinds of rootsy bases, from the Celtic accents of the opener, "Away I Will Be," to the Sons of the Pioneers- inspired "Crossing Alone" to the almost funky zydeco of "Zydeco Began." There's the country soul of "The Heart of Your Criminal Mind" and a modern cowboy ballad in "If Memory Serves Me" )co-written by that other Canadian cowboy singer, Ian Tyson).

All of these (and the rest of the 11 tracks on this album), are delivered in tempos that are just a little too slow, with arrangements that lean too heavily on MacDougall's electric piano. It's motel lounge music. It's Jimmy Buffet's gulf-and-western sung by an Eddie Arnold wannabe. It's Roger Whitaker's country-folk album, with backing vocals by Billy Cowsill and The Chordinaires. It's a coaster.

The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash have a great moniker, but don't have the goods to back up their claimed lineage. Distance Between is a rootsy rocker that rarely lives up to its billing.

My bullshit gauge starts twitching when a record compares itself in the liner notes to such classics as Steve Earle's Guitar Town, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball. Well, OK, producer Mark Howard was the engineer on Wrecking Ball, and lead vocalist and songwriter Mark Stuart sounds kinda like Adam Duritz of Counting Crows doing his best Springsteen imitation, and ... um, well, it's a kind-of rootsy rocking country-ish record with a good deal of guitar playing, but Stuart is no Steve Earle.

A little bit of his over-emotive vocal style goes a long way. It'd be different if he had much of anything to say, but not much here rises above your average Hootie and the Blowfish record in terms of lyrical profundity. Here's an example "You cry all night long, till sleep comes down/You wake to find that you're still here.../in your beautiful cage," (from the final track, "Beautiful Cage.")

The record kicks off in high gear with "Monte Carlo," a flat-out honky-tonk ode to a fast car. But the rest of the CD never really lives up to the promise of the opening track, except "Burn Down," a mid-tempo shuffle full of understated passion and some pretty good couplets, like "I'm walking just for walking/I got nowhere left to go/Sometimes you come too far/and you never can go home."

Stuart gives a fairly pedestrian reading of "Long Black Veil," the lone cover on the disc. The stripped-down production is nice on this one, with its stuttering tom-tom, Greg Leisz's moaning pedal steel, and ghostly backing vocals on the chorus.

If these are sons of Johnny, bastard or otherwise, the gene pool got watered down somewhere.

The best songwriters tend to be those who have done a lot of other things besides write and sing songs. That's probably why Paul Thorn is among the best in alt-country at the beginning of the 21st Century. A Southern preacher's son, Thorn has been a furniture maker and a professional boxer among other pursuits, and he writes and sings some of the best songs around, about the funny, tragic and just plain bizarre sides of life.

The song, "Mission Temple Fireworks Stand" was the standout track on a 2001 EP, Still No Hits, and Mission Temple Fireworks Stand the CD fulfills the promise of that teaser. In fact, it fulfills the promise of Thorn as an artist, and his distribution deal with the independent Americana label Back Porch should help make him more of a household name, as he deserves.

Thorn and his songwriting and producing partner Billy Maddox have a gift for distilling a lifetime into a short and catchy song, as is amply demonstrated by every one of the 12 tracks on Fireworks Stand. The absolute best is the title track, a rollicking, gospel-tinged tale of a man who combines his ministry with a fireworks business, "selling cherry bombs for Jesus in a tent beside the road." There are several other scorchers as well, including the opener, "Everybody Looks Good at the Starting Line," "There's Something Out There," and "Sister Ruby's House of Prayer." The white-trash anthem "Ain't Livin' in Sin No More" takes on holy hypocrisy, as does "Nothin' But the Devil."

Thorn's quiet side is displayed here in "Downtown Babylon," "I'm a Lucky Man," (both about the dangers and temptations of the entertainment business)and the folk-soul of "Things Left Undone." There's a quieter take on hypocrisy "Even Heroes Die," which contrasts the hero worship for Elvis with the lonely homeless death of a street preacher.

In lesser hands, a song like "Angel Too Soon," about a family's loss of a little girl, could be maudlin or slickly sentimental, but Thorn and Co. hit all the right notes.