With Rev it Up and Go-Go, Dupree tosses that to the wind and goes half-and-half. The first eight tracks could easily have made up two-thirds of a Jackyl record: They're rowdy, loud, Les Paul-driven rock 'n' roll numbers with Southern flavors.

They don't quite hold up against the material from Relentless, the band's fantastic last record -- and they definitely don't approach the redneck perfection of Jackyl's classic self-titled debut -- but it's hard not to get a kick out of "Bite" and "Tank." "1095 Days" slows things down and gets bluesy without losing Dupree's signature intensity.

Sure, "Money Lovin' and Speed" is a little hyper, and the riff from "Wash Me Away" too closely echoes that from "Tank," but these tracks are boisterous enough that the standard Jackyl fan will eat them up, especially given the six-year wait since Relentless.

So at track nine, it will surprise listeners more than a little to hear the beginning of a country show. Not a country-inspired rock show along Lynyrd Skynyrd lines, but a full-blown twangy, exaggerated-Southern-accent, hokey, yee-haw-partner country show. Dupree's backing band goes by "Dixie Inc."

Insofar as this reviewer can even tell good country from bad, it's mediocre. "One Extreme Intro" is pretty listenable, presuming you don't mind it when "ain't" and "can't" rhyme. But otherwise the songwriting is riddled with cliches; anyone who's heard a country song before can tell where many of the melodies, guitar riffs, and chord changes are going long before they get there. The lyrics, especially on "The Party," get painfully cheesy at times.

And for crying out loud, did this guy seriously bait his longtime fans with eight rock tracks, and then switch to this country crap halfway through? It's nothing against the genre -- to each his own -- but if Dupree wants to make a record for a country audience, he should do that. Heavy rock and true-blue country have little enough overlap in their fan bases that three or more tracks of one genre don't fit on a record belonging to the other.

Also, if Dupree really needed to make a country-metal album, he should have blended the genres in each and every song; that's a lot more interesting, and hearing a couple tracks on the radio wouldn't give listeners the wrong idea as to what the whole record is about.

David Allan Coe and the three non-vocal Pantera members did this in the Rebel Meets Rebel side project -- it worked surprisingly well, so much so that the sound they created deserves its own genre. Dupree includes a banjo on the title track (on the "rock" side of the album), which is cool, and if he'd fleshed out that idea instead of making each subsequent track all-rock or all-country, he'd have much more of an accomplishment on his hands.

Jackyl fans who also love country -- probably a decent proportion, given the band's Georgia roots -- should pick this up. Country fans who can't stand rock probably won't miss much by forgoing Dupree's foray into their genre. But the rest of Jackyl's fan base has to ask itself, "Is it worth buying a whole record when only eight of the songs are meant for me?"