Jackpot is a power-trio of guys who've been playing music together on and off since the days of middle school marching band. There must be some dirty and dusty roads in the band’s hometown of Placerville, CA, as Weightless is 11 tracks of country flavored whiskey-rock with an appreciative nod to the likes of Wilco, Sun Volt and that whole family.

In the Y2K, it’s all you can do to find any object or situation not driven by a silicon chip. Bands like Jackpot let you slip away to simpler times and places. The production is intentionally lo-fi and the album has the ability to take you out of the driver’s seat and the traffic jam and spirit you off to a wood-paneled townie bar where a pretty girl in a summer dress is dancing up front with a dirty man twice her own age, and no one’s batting an eye. This is feel-good music with a fair share of sappy sad nostalgia left over from a rural life you probably didn’t get to lead.

For certain, the alt-country phenomenon has produced a haystack of forced and insincere records -- but in Weightless, Future Farmer might have found the elusive needle. Rusty Miller’s vocals and lyrics are convincing, sometimes even tastefully poetic. But wedged in with the farm fields, wrap-around porches and “making windchimes out of bottlecaps at four in the morning,” there’s also a good smart wit that keeps everything from becoming too damn Indie-Dukes-of-Hazzard. Take “La La Land”, the opening track on the record. Miller’s weaving a good old yarn about a girl and a her guy who just wants to “lay around with you / unplug the phone / nobody’s home -… we used to stay up / night after night / blasting Judas Priest / and Beethoven’s 9th …- let’s go buy a stereo / with your student loan.”

The players play well, and the lyrics are quite a prize. My only complaint here is that at times, the actual songs themselves follow traditional structures too closely. This isn’t always a problem, but what won me over to Wilco was the first song on Being There, which breaks so many songwriting rules in the best of ways that you swear if they did a whole record like that, it’d be some Dark Side of the Moon or Sgt. Peppers situation. Weightless doesn’t test the waters too much in the area of arrangements. It’d be nice to see that happen in the future. I’d be a fan.