Jamie O’Hara “Rise Above It” <i> RCA</i>

Jamie O’Hara is back on his own after making three admirable albums as half of the O’Kanes. His partner in that band, Kieran Kane, released his first post-O’Kanes album earlier this year, and now the other shoe drops with O’Hara’s new solo effort. O’Kanes fans should be pleased to find that the rich drawl, the swampy Southern country-rock musical settings and unconventional takes on life and love that typified the O’Kanes are still very much present here.

One of the most comforting things about this album is that O’Hara hasn’t abandoned writing from unusual points of view. In “The Cold Hard Truth,” the voice of objective reality speaks to a man who would try to deceive himself and others about his responsibility for hurting the one he loved: “You say you’re not the one to blame / For all the heartache she’s been through / I say you’re nothin’ but a liar / I am the cold hard truth.” In another, he assumes the voice of a man’s heart who straightforwardly declares “It Ain’t Over (‘Til Your Heart Says It’s Over”).

At the same time, he can write simply and powerfully in the first person, as he does in “For Reasons I’ve Forgotten.” The song, which Emmylou Harris covered recently, is a confession of remorse over a relationship that disintegrated.

While he doesn’t quite pull off the Gargantuan task of gleaning some transcendent meaning from the Vietnam War in a three-minute song (“50,000 Names”), he does exceedingly well when he sticks close to heart and home for most of the rest of the album.