Just one minute into the lead track on Ryan Adams’s new album, “Easy Tiger,” the now infamously impetuous singer/songwriter sounds so on-point perfect that it forgives any past bad-boy transgressions. Two electric guitars carve out a rippling, intertwined melody. The pace surges at the chorus before settling into a melancholic sway during the verses. And Mr. Adams rasps bittersweet lines of a life lived too intensely. “Let go of the worry, there’s so much nobody understands,” he sings. “Don’t live your life in such a hurry, life goes by us all so fast.”

The classic country-rock of “Goodnight Rose” announces the return to songwriting basics that defines “Easy Tiger” (Lost Highway), Mr. Adams’s ninth solo album since disbanding his upstart country outfit, Whiskeytown, in 1999. It’s the sort of album that traditional alt-country fans have been waiting for since Mr. Adams’s 2000 solo debut, “Heartbreaker” — and that return to roots-rock is precisely what makes “Easy Tiger” such an underwhelming experience.

Make no mistake about it: “Easy Tiger” might not be as warmly received by the same critics who lambasted Mr. Adams’s impulsive impudence in recent years after fawning over 2001’s “Gold,” but you can bet it will be fecklessly branded with that most tepid laurel, “mature.” In the years since “Gold,” Mr. Adams has cranked out albums and songs the way Joyce Carol Oates churns out books — seven official releases in eight years and countless online-only songs through his Web site. The material tried out just about every genre and stylistic hybrid in pop music, including a befuddling foray into hip-hop. Mr. Adams has also become easy-target blog fodder through the years, living a tabloid life complete with a movie-star girlfriend, voicemail tirades aimed at music critics, onstage meltdowns, and substantial problems with drugs and alcohol. The lack of a self-editor, both in and out of the studio, earned the insouciant Mr. Adams a reputation for self-destruction.

All the while Mr. Adams worked overtime to cast off the “alt-country” tag from his music, and in recent days he has also cast off the addictions that, by his own estimation, left him teetering on the edge of sanity and even death. So the drugs are gone, but on “Easy Tiger,” the alt-country is back. The album’s 13 songs are straightforward, pop-friendly twang, all tinted with a gimlet-eyed weariness that is its creator’s greatest lyrical gift. Even in Whiskeytown, Mr. Adams mined stories of romantic and personal disappointments that flirted with Townes Van Zandt’s wells of misanthropy, where beguiling melodies softened the rough edges of bitterness.

“Easy Tiger” finds Mr. Adams dipping deep into that bag and pulling out finely honed gemstones. “Two” sways to a summery melodic breeze over which Mr. Adams’s narrator takes his best shot at romantic apology but sounds as if he knows he doesn’t have it in him: “If I could I’d treat you like you wanted me to I promise / but I’m fractured from the fall, and I want to go home.” “Tears of Gold” is straight up, singalong majestic crying-in-beer honky-tonk. And the literal heartbreak downer “Two Hearts” — “two hearts, one of them will break / like bad ideas on a beautiful day” — has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first time Mr. Adams has resorted to leaden musical and lyrical cliché in his career.

The best songs on “Easy Tiger” are the two most traditional. “Pearls on a String” is a refreshingly hopeful bit of front-porch finger picking. And “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.” is a gorgeous wash of acoustic guitars that colorfully shade a picturesque snapshot of working-class survival, revealing two qualities never expected of the brash Mr. Adams: confident understatement and low-key intimacy.

Sadly, these high points leave the rest of the album’s uniformity feeling listless. Mr. Adams might have failed more often than he succeeded during his explosively scattershot 21st century, but he never dulled his ambition. That impudence might have fueled his lowest moments, but he backs off from it so much here that “Easy Tiger” feels like an act of contrition. When critics inevitably laud the album’s focused professionalism as maturity, it’ll be like parents complimenting their 33-year-old child for finally getting a haircut and a cubicle career.

Mr. Adams is without a doubt one of the most prolifically gifted songwriters of his generation, but he sounds, for the first time, unsure of his instincts. With the right self-discipline — something that may come as he grows more comfortable with sobriety — he has the restless talent to evolve into a Steve Earle caliber lightning rod. At the moment, though, he’s merely another former next-big-thing looking for his footing.