From the title and the first very verse, down to the almost apocalyptic final track, the Meat Puppets’ new album is a visceral and emotional effort to stand up and walk again after epic travails.

Over the 15 songs on “Rise to Your Knees,” the beloved, influential psychedelic-pop punk trio from Phoenix, Ariz., tries to find the spark that made its fascinating 1980s albums and commercially successful early 1990s output so blissful, infectious, and innovative. And while the trio occasionally stumbles across that elusive spirit, too much of “Rise” creeks with a conspicuous effort to make things work as they once did. It makes for an undeniably sentimental adventure, but the melodrama only yields an average album.

“You can run but you’ll never get away from the smell of the garbage,” singer/guitarist Curt Kirkwood sings in his wonderfully off-pitch and reedy southern burr on the album’s lead track, “Fly Like the Wind.” His voice bubbles out of a primordial ooze of guitar notes, which meander around as if searching for a melody or a purpose. Anyone familiar with band’s history will recognize this mood as Mr. Kirkwood’s blithe gift for dramatic understatement.

“Rise” is the Meat Puppets’ first studio album since 2000’s “Golden Lies.” The Puppets that recorded that album, however, were a quartet hastily assembled by Mr. Kirkwood in 1999. The original band disbanded in 1996 after bassist Cris Kirkwood, Curt’s brother, succumbed to a drug addiction that spiraled dangerously out of control. Further exacerbating his difficulties, Cris was shot by a Phoenix security guard in December 2003 and pled guilty to aggravated assault, entering prison with the bullet still in his back.

“Rise” is the first album Curt and Cris Kirkwood have recorded together since 1995’s “No Joke!” Gone is original drummer Derrick Bostrom, with Ted Marcus now behind the kit, but the album’s faults have nothing to do with the new rhythm section. From the punchy thrust of “Spit,” to the distorted flamenco splashes powering “Island,” the off-key harmonizing swimming through the upbeat “Radio Moth” to the double-time rock of “New Leaf,” “Rise” sounds like a band playing in its own shadow.

All the familiar elements remain: Curt’s seductively sunbaked vocals and his beguiling lyrics that move from innocuous observation to surreal tangent, and his guitar acrobatics, equally at home with full-throttle speed, country & western lyricism, florid Latin melodies, and psychedelic sculpture. Cris’s bass retains its casually propulsive funkiness and underscores his brother’s abstractions. And Mr. Marcus is pliable and responsive, fully capable of shifting through the varied moods that Curt’s songwriting requires.

Sadly, these components rarely come together at the same time. The pulsating “The Ship” is the sort of summery, mellow psychedelia that the Meat Puppets could write in their sleep in their prime, but the lyrics and the music never quite complement each other. “Stone Eyes” starts off feeling like one of the Puppets’ curveball story songs, but Curt steers the song further and further afield, until his brief but scintillating guitar solo erupts to curb the wandering. It’s not a bad song, just one that loses its focus — which wouldn’t be disappointing were it not coming from a man who brought focus to blurriness, the punk songwriter who reinvented the form by making the plain sparkle, the bizarre tangible, and the superficially meaningless intimately meaningful.

Admittedly, it’s hard for any band to live up to its own legend, and anybody who spent — or still spends — entire summers with 1984’s “Meat Puppets II” and 1985’s “Up on the Sun” can’t hear the warm guitar reverb and finger-picked banjo of the almost magical “Tiny Kingdom” and not feel nostalgic for the countrified pop-punk alchemy that once poured out of the Kirkwood brothers like running water.

This edition of the Meat Puppets hasn’t quite rekindled that spark — except on the near perfect “Enemy Love Song,” a jaunty pinwheel of bittersweet reality. Over a shimmering melody, Curt practically smiles the revealing/concealing verses that move from despair to contrition to hope. “I thought that it was over / These days seemed to be the days of wine”; “You’ve done as you pleased / Now down on your knees”; “There’s a shudder in the evening wind / I can feel the fight again.”

Without this song, “Rise toy Your Knees” is a commendable comeback album. But “Enemy Love Song” is a stark reminder of just what the Meat Puppets are capable of pulling off. Hopefully it’s just a glimpse of what’s still to come. As the album’s very title proclaims, these days the band is only halfway to where it wants to be.