hat General MacArthur said of old soldiers seems to hold true for power-poppers as well: they don’t die, they just fade away. And sometimes they fade back in; after years of relative obscurity, Chris Stamey recently released two of the best albums of his career. Another avenue is reinvention; Ike, after all, went from General to President, and a million miles away from the heyday of the Plimsouls, Peter Case has enjoyed success as an acoustic troubadour.

Then there’s Tommy Keene: just saying the name out loud conjures up tangible memories of excitedly awaiting the new issue of The Bob, wondering who will grace its beloved flexidisc this month. As another living relic of the power-pop glory days Keene, too, has traveled long and far from his late-80s period of major-labeldom and cinematic fame (well, a brief appearance in the Anthony Michael Hall film Out of Bounds—which, while no Citizen Kane, arguably trumps comparable competition like John Stockwell’s Under Cover). Though Keene released some solo albums on Matador in the 90s, he joined Tobin Sprout in failing to win his deserved share of the indie label’s hipster sparkle-dust, and so he’s long paid the bills as a hired hand for everyone from Velvet Crush to Robert Pollard.

Now Keene is back, after a few years of inaction, with a new album. Crashing the Ether is an entirely respectable, often enjoyable album, reflecting our man’s consummate professionalism, if perhaps excessively so. One reference point for Keene has always been Paul Westerberg, for whom he’s also slung an axe on tour, but from the start Keene has been the careful craftsman of Don’t Tell a Soul, not the nakedly intimate artist of Let It Be; even impeccable pop gems from the old days like “Back to Zero Now” and “Misunderstood” baited their sharp hooks with more brains than heart. On Crashing the Ether he veers dangerously close to becoming the “mature” songwriter of Eventually. Crashing never falls into that wretched album’s black hole of tedium, but a persistent whisper echoes through it. By the end of the closing track’s six lengthy minutes, that whisper’s syllables have taken form: “adult contemporary.”

That’s not to say Keene will be soon be touring with Train or, God forbid, his dreary homonymic British counterparts Keane. Crashing the Ether still has the hooks, but it unwisely dilutes them in songs with running times better suited for prog-rock; the album’s ten songs average approximately four and a half minutes apiece, and they feel it. Even when the album hits its stride with a three-track run in the middle, “Wishing,” “Lives Become Lies,” and “Eyes of Youth” feel like three would-be hit singles, but with the b-sides integrated in as padding rather than saved for separate tracks.

What Keene needs most is an editor, but he could also use a producer. The first sound on this self-produced album is John Richardson’s drums (Keene does virtually everything else), and they’re gigantic, recorded in the clearly spacious foyer of Keene’s house. But while that sound works wonders on, say, the Comsat Angels’ intentionally oppressive Sleep No More, here it serves counterproductive ends, leaving Keene’s guitars and vocals sounding smaller than they really are. His slightly nasal voice earns bonus nostalgia points for recalling the woefully-MIA Kevin Salem, and his skilled strumming ranges from the chiming jangle of would-be 80s-refugee track “Quit That Scene” to the dirtier grit of “I’ve Heard That Wind Blow Before.” These elements deserve to lead the charge, not drown in the wake of Richardson’s wallop.

Temporal sprawl and drum-centric production weigh the album down and prevent it from reaching the stratospheric aspirations of its title, but in the end they can’t ruin a fundamentally solid work. There isn’t, properly speaking, a bad song in the bunch, just several over-long and somewhat meandering ones. Keene’s subject matters are enjoyably offbeat, and the Beattyfied “Warren in the 60’s” even has a sly line about a “former life” that obliquely invokes sister Shirley MacLaine. Keene as Keene is better than Keene as hired gun any day, and if nothing else, Crashing the Ether should whet the appetite for his next effort, a collaboration with Pollard that will combine his two roles. Apparently the Keene Brothers album will use material written for Crashing the Ether; we’ve seen what Tommy Keene can do with it, and it’ll be interesting at the very least to hear Uncle Bob give it a whirl. Until then, Keene will remain not-dead, but not quite un-faded away.