In the boundless sea of overproduced records and impotent pop/rock musicians being spat out of the mainstream these days, The Fratellis have always managed to stay dry. Their twisting melodies were unpredictable and their raucous anthems fired up hockey fans while still garnering the appreciation of people who understand that The Beatles are the greatest band of all time. Their frontman Jon Fratelli was their edge—a raspy voice rising through a choir of eunuchs—but he left more than his band mates behind in the creation of his solo debut, Psycho Jukebox. Repetitive songs beat Fratelli’s good ideas to death and overproduction irons out the fantastic wrinkle The Fratellis pressed into the mainstream. It’s not that the album is horrible, but it’s like drinking Natty Light—it’s bearable listening if you like listening a lot—it’s simple, watered down enough of it is unsettling to the stomach.

An annoying drum machine with a static and fuzzy snare hauls the track “Daddy Won’t Pay Your Bill” over its shoulder and carries it through a stagnant four minutes of wishing Fratelli had hired a real drummer. A midi piano blurts out choppy eighth notes, and the only real instrument being played—Fratelli’s acoustic guitar—is barely audible through the overproduced slab of sound. The melody is uninteresting and could just as easily be sung by a five-year-old attempting to express the simplicity of his thoughts in melodic form. A bell effect chiming at the beginning of the chorus alerts listeners that the only dynamic part of the song has arrived as Fratelli chops some pauses into the chorus line, “I know you don’t mean it to sound this strange,” reminding us of his unique ear for negative space in melody. When he continues, “I know you’re just misunderstood,” Fratelli effectively transforms a Fratelli fan into the vocalist and himself into the subject of his lyric as the song draws to a welcome end.

Though tracks like “Daddy Won’t Pay Your Bill” checker the album, “Baby We’re Refugees” rearranges the largely clumsy pieces of his new sound into good music. Fratelli shifts the perspective to the first person and allows his voice and guitar to take the wheel from the plastic-sounding effects and production in earlier tracks to drive the song home. The track opens with a refreshing authenticity in the faltering of Fratelli’s voice and the tremble of his grainy vibrato. There’s a beating heart behind his lyrics as he describes a lonesome night where “the red light fades and the sun won’t shine / try to chase these ghosts from this heart of mine.” A quick bridge with a minor and longing tone over which Fratelli wails, “Take me down where the people carry roses / take me down where the street signs know me inside out,” sets up a chorus in which Fratelli, harmonizing with a shaky female voice, begs, “Carry me home.” He cries out for escape from a life under red lights. The sounds are soaked in cheap wine and seem to emerge from a hazy soul reeling in the small hours of the morning.

It’s this sound that Fratelli successfully conjures up—though sparingly—in tracks like “Oh Shangri-La” and “Caveman”—anthems that glow in neon light, smell like the end of a bender and twinkle before the dawn as they portray a man making a companion of the night.

This album is where Fratelli’s career should have started. His sound is not the only thing that misses the company of his band—his person, too, seems to be longing for something gone. When Fratelli sings, “This jukebox don’t play no Sinatra / It just curses all night long,” in “Oh Shangri-La,” he does well to describe his EP—the “Frank” is gone from The Fratellis of the past. Nonetheless, Psycho Jukebox has some highlights, and at the end of the day, Jon Fratelli’s noteworthy songwriting intermittently shimmers through his rather unsuccessful experiment and might be worth a listen—or at least a play as background music.