There’s something naturally curious about a city guy singing western music in Ian Tyson’s mold. Kerry Grombacher sings about the wide open spaces and rural towns, where there aren’t as many distractions and people have to face themselves. It’s a world the tracks of time are less obvious, and cars and horses co-exist as means of transportation. “Rock Springs,” he sings, “is a state of mind” and that could be said of most of the songs. His west is as lonely as Tyson’s, but it’s not as detailed, emerging as much from his imagination as any reality. That means clichéd images can creep in and the characters have two-and-a-half dimensions at best, but he sings of a world that is largely omitted from the American story today, so who’d know?

He’s at home in his songs, though. They move along at a comfortable pace, and there’s space in them. He doesn’t ask too much of his voice, but it has a plain spoken, sober quality that gives his stories some reality. He believes them, or sings as if he does. The spare instrumentation only catches up to Grombacher on “Wild West Mambo,” which connects Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to Mardi Gras Indians—a good idea, but the music’s a deliberately familiar rewrite of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” and without a stronger voice or groove, the song’s three minutes feel like six.

“Wild West Mambo” and “Cajun Cowboy” are understandable as they try to link Grombacher’s musical world with the one he actually lives in. Here, he has to feel like a character in his songs. He’s alone; there’s no one making music like him, but the world of It Sings in the Hi-Line is elsewhere, and making it sound relevant in New Orleans requires a strain nothing else in the album shows.