A welcome return to that down-home sound

Bo Bice

“See The Light (Sugar Money/StratArt)

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Shooter Jennings

“The Wolf” (Universal South)

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Beyond a laissez-faire attitude toward personal grooming, Bo Bice and Shooter Jennings don’t appear to share much in common. Bice is best known as the scruffy longhaired guy who lost to Carrie Underwood on the fourth season of “American Idol.” And Jennings is the son of outlaw-country singers Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter. Yet on their new albums (due Tuesday), each man sounds determined to leave behind the showbiz excesses of his past in an attempt to tap into a humble well of roots-music honesty.

Bice’s post-”Idol” major-label debut, 2005’s “The Real Thing,” smothered his unvarnished bar-band appeal with over-the-top radio anthems designed to attract fans of Nickelback. Now that fellow “Idol” alum Chris Daughtry is ably serving that constituency, Bice spends “See the Light” concentrating on what he does best, which is the kind of soulful, vaguely funky Southern rock the Black Crowes used to churn out by the bucket load.

Bice’s re-imaging campaign here is not a subtle one.

“I grew up on Merle Haggard, ZZ Top and [the Charlie Daniels Band],” he announces in “Take the Country Outta Me,” which warns potential handlers that trips to L.A. are no threat to the “sweet Dixieland” in Bice’s bones. But it is efficient; even a sax-equipped ballad, “Only Words,” shores up Bice’s down-home persona.

Jennings works a similar (and similarly effective) regular-guy shtick on “The Wolf,” his third studio disc and the first on which he hasn’t seemed to try too hard to live up to his dad’s legacy as a boundary-busting iconoclast.

Despite its menacing title and the inclusion of a cover of Dire Straits’ “Walk of Life,” there’s more country than rock here, and that suits Jennings’ handsome baritone just fine.

Free of both bark and bite, “The Wolf” is an unexpected charmer.

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Mikael Wood

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Otep

“The Ascension” (Koch)

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You gotta burn in purgatory before you can rise. After both her band and her former label (Capitol) underwent conflagrations, L.A.’s Otep Shamaya had to scrape off some char, but the long-delayed “The Ascension” (in stores Oct. 30) finds the metal throatwoman fully fired for the beatific vision.

Accepting a lift from some angels -- Evanescence and Mudvayne producer Dave Fortman, Mudvayne songwriter Greg Tribbett and all-purpose songwriter Holly Knight -- Shamaya and bassist eVil J. have shaped the most professional of Otep’s three full-lengths without sacrificing the passion or the poetry.

Track flows into track through buffers of ambient smoke and preschool rhyme as Shamaya sings and chants her saga of transgression and violence, familial and international. The music tumbles and batters along: the dazed croon and momentous plunge of “Milk of Regret”; the Afghanian drone and layered riffing of “Noose and Nail”; the shivering jet roar and summertime rumble of “Breed”; a concluding dream narration scary enough to be real.

Aware that the raw edges could’ve abraded fans’ auricles, producer Fortman craftily skirts the threshold of pain, giving Shamaya’s torture chamber a wide-screen dimensional window and just enough padding to let the album qualify as entertainment.

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Greg Burk

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Albums are rated on a scale of four stars (excellent), three stars (good), two stars (fair) and one star (poor). Albums reviewed have been released except as indicated.