Staging a humorous humility two weeks ago on the Tonight Show, Chris Isaak joked about his low summit in rock 'n' roll's mountain range.

Isaak's got the weaponry to craft elegant ballads to swing-laced grooves and the vocal capacity to honk like Randy Travis and to howl like Jim Morrison. But he's never shown the knack to tackle top-twenty radio.

His latest album, Always Got Tonight, looks up to the thin-aired peaks of Presley Point and Mt. Dylan, but still casts a tall shadow over newcomers John Mayer and Matthew Jay. From the get go, opening track "One Day" starts an acoustic and foot-stomping roll overtop a spell of background tambourines and organs. Isaak's silky-smooth vocals bear strong resemblance to Roy Orbison, but weary lyrics and a beating meter starts the album out on a tedious beat.

Isaak's lyricy continues to pummel us with worn love clichés and predictable rhymes. He has more ways to say "with you/for you/over you" than the Wiccan thesaurus, Sully Erna, and his barrage of "go away/stay away/keep away." But Isaak's melodic versatility compensates his verbal capacity, enabling the music to tell more of a story than the lyrics.

Case in point: the album's best song, "Worked it Out Wrong." Its tropical twang will pull up an arch of a smile while a prickling piano paints a picture of a painful, but promising, breakup in paradise. While his sexy sopranos exude a strong confidence, Isaak paints the picture of himself staring at a telephone waiting for a lost lover to heed his onslaught on apologies.

"Cool Love" unpoetically portrays the ease in repeatedly rebounding in the welcoming arms of a close friend, but its driving acoustics and backing vocals beg your fingers to hover around the replay button.

Isaak doesn't stop there. Flexing from the country-flavored single, "Let Me Down Easy," Isaak also summons a jazzy injection of disco in his self-produced track, "Notice the Ring."

Drab spots on the album like "Somebody to Love" and "I See You Everywhere" tug Isaak's charm into a sea storm of boredom. Hiding between the two is the ear-grabbing rockabilly-hillbilly jam, "American Boy." Such a title can prepare the ears for the tacky pride of John Mellencamp, but Isaak wisely steered the song's mood away from such a redundant fate.

Always Got Tonight proves Isaak is expanding into other genres at the ease of his listeners' ears. Country accents have been gracefully bowing into modern rock's alcoves with Ryan Adams and the Old 97's leading the way. Always Got Tonight leaks a similar twang but at the expense of Isaak's exploration into the deeper crevasses of rock n' roll. His previous album, Speak of the Devil, was tinged with a '60s swing, as was 1995's Forever Blue and its brilliant opener, "Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing."

Over the years, Isaak has played the sorrow card fairly well with tales tempting lovers, heartbreaking betrayal and tear-jerking loneliness. In today's rock scene, a visible tattoo is usually the license required to sing about such emptiness. Isaak's upturned Bob Hope nose, thick black hair and movie star demeanor is an energetic and refreshing dose of depression, as is Always Got Tonight. But if I had half of Isaak's looks, I'd be getting over past lovers mighty fast and getting something else if you know what I mean.