Some of you more faithful OffBeat readers may remember the name of Woody’s Rampage and its star guitarist, Ryan Hall, from this writer’s review of Patrick Williams and His Blues Xpress’s album Big Easy Blues, wherein native Texas guitarist Hall guested on what was a perfectly competent soul-blues album and ended up tearing the paint off the walls. The good news is that he’s still just as ferocious on his own band’s latest—but it unfortunately sounds like he took all the wrong lessons to heart from his side trip, fashioning an album of flashy, garish classic rock that makes him sound, ironically, like just another hired hand.

Make no mistake: Hall is a force of nature, and he knows it, stepping up to the Hendrix deep cut “In from the Storm,” Jeff Beck’s “Freeway Jam,” and not one but two Clapton homages (Cream’s “White Room” and the Beatles’ “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) like he had any right to try them on. And given the result, he does. His love of soul and R&B also remains happily intact, which is why Don Nix’s Stax classic “Going Down,” TLC’s “Waterfalls” and Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” all get the Woody treatment. (“Waterfalls” in particular now sounds like a lost Hendrix outtake.)

But as the back cover’s mission statement has it, this is all in service of bumping his boys up from “bar band” to “festival-bound power trio,” and both are bad personas for Hall: As a blue-eyed soul man who plays blues-rock with a jazzman’s interpretive approach, he’s too unique to be knocking off crowd-pleasers, and as a singer, he has trouble finding a place for his screechy yawp in these warhorses; too often, his Jim Dandy-meets-Chris Cornell approach wanders around looking for an emotional connection. His few originals are workmanlike but nothing special, although “Fi Yo” has a funk groove so tight he wisely ditches the bombast and rides it out. But he’s also better than cock-rock karaoke renditions of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” and the Animals’ take on “House of the Rising Sun,” especially since he’s accidentally attached his songwriting credit to both. Just another symptom of his identity crisis, probably.