"Up From The Hill" channels Earle's best driving rock-country, hearkening back to his Guitar Town eighties heyday, coupling a driving backbeat with jangling guitars and the gravelly vocals to create the perfect hook for country radio to ignore -- at its peril. It's the sound country music was built on, a sound we don?t get to hear often enough.

And when Knight breaks a song down to its bare acoustic grace, as he does on "Old Man," the results are expressive and brutally honest. "I'm an old man, I've done all I can," he sings mournfully. "I've been workin' this land since I was 24. I'm an old man, ain't a whole lot goin' on around here anymore." Knight's old man is a broken down figure who misses his wife and his kids and knows that he's worked all his life on land that isn't going to be able to give him what he really wants. It's effective and there's not a honky-tonk or a pickup truck in earshot.

Proving that you can sometimes mine the same creative ground twice, "William's Son" continues the story of "William," which in turn was the most affecting song on Knight's debut Chris Knight in which a young man grows up with an abusive father, spends time in reform school and ends up being killed by a sheriff during an unsuccessful robbery. The original mentioned that though William tried to raise his children right, he sometimes wound up treating them like his father had treated him. "William's Son" opens with the son of this man singing about how his father had been killed, about how he went from foster home to foster home and ends with the song's protagonist admitting that he's not sorry he lost his father.

One shot from a lawman's gun
And my father paid for the things he'd done
I know it ain't right to feel this way
But I'm kinda glad my dad got blown away.
I know he grew up hard and he grew up mean
But me and my sister was not to blame!

Like the songs of his hero Steve Earle, tracks like "William's Son" are successful because they're bare-boned, honest pieces of a world that often gets sensationalized and honored for all the wrong reasons. The protagonist in "William" and his son in "William's Son" are both worthy of consideration because they each grew up in the same world, a product of their upbringing. The question remains at the end of both songs whether anyone was actually redeemed, whether the cycle of violence would, or could, be broken.

Chris Knight has crafted an album-lover's album. But that's no real surprise from a man who's been creating solid albums since 1998, earning him a real reputation in the world of Americana. Enough Rope is an album which is often hard to listen to because the characters are made so real to us. It is because of that often brutal honesty that the album deserves to be heard.