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Annie Sims’ new album serves up an easy, if not wholly satisfying, slice of her native East Tennessee countryside. With a voice reminiscent of Nancy Griffith, and backed up by guitar, fiddle, banjo and the Nashville String Machine, one wants her songs to resonate. But while most tracks are listenable in an “if-it-was-playing-on-my-radio-I-wouldn’t-turn-the-dial” sort of way, there aren’t any that really grab our collar and make us listen, either.

“You Don’t Have to Tell Me Twice,” starts off with a feel-good, zydeco-light, foot-tapping rhythm. But what happens on the chorus is emblematic of the album: it just doesn’t break out and take us anywhere new.

The next track, “Eighty Acres of Stars,” is noticeably stronger, a sweet ballad about a girl falling for a guy who offers her the whole night sky. One of four singles released off the album, it was written by Richard Leigh and Layng Martine, Jr. Leigh, who penned “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” for Crystal Gayle, based the song on the story of how he proposed to his wife.

Of the other three singles, “Tennessee Fix” is my favorite: a line-dancing, Electric Slide where a country girl needs to escape from city life, “headin’ for the Smokies Just to Rehabilitate.” On the other hand, the ballad “Dear Heartache”—about a woman writing a Dear John to the heartbreak she’s been nursing—gets a shrug. “Doesn’t Anyone Love Like That Anymore,” another ballad, gets even less. It starts out well enough, with a clear-as-a-bell melancholy in the verse, but then modulates into a chorus which robs Sims’ voice of fullness and casts it with tinny overtones. A better choice for a single release would have been the title track, one of the easiest listening ballads on the album, a tender wish on a divided moon for a lover to come back home.

“Concrete Ribbon,” which lays down a mellow road-beat rhythm with hints of bluegrass banjo and fiddle, could have been a contender, except that I kept wishing it would pick up and kick loose instead of holding a steady windshield-wiper beat.

Stylistically, the rest of the album offers more of the same: nothing bad, just not much to shout about. Half the Moon is Sims’ U.S. debut album (her first commercial album, Annie, was released in the U.K.). She has a nice voice, and a generally good feel for phrasing, but like the full moon on her cover art, the album comes across in monochromatic shades of blue.