By SCOTT LINDLAW
ASAP

Jay Farrar and his band Son Volt tour the country in a dirty white van, their gear stashed in a trailer with Missouri plates and a bumper sticker that reads, ''Work is for people who don't know how to golf.''

Notably absent in the trailer is a pedal-steel guitar, the musical hallmark of heartache and honky-tonks -- the signature country music sound. The pedal steel has figured prominently in Farrar's music in the past, but today, he is driving full-throttle into new musical terrain. Old fans are welcome aboard; Farrar takes a few detours through familiar back roads, too.

WHO'S GOT THE BOUZOUKI?

The humble van belies Farrar's influence on the rock landscape. In the 1990s, Farrar helped launch a musical genre, alt-country -- roughly the cross street where country hits punk rock. And while he's not running away from that history, Son Volt's new album, ''The Search,'' serves up sounds so innovative they sometimes startle. While the record's gotten mixed reviews (The New York Times: ''Simple but effective sonic details''/Blender: ''The saggy country-rock complaints about corporatization and alienation he (Farrar) offers on the fifth Son Volt album sound like submissions to an Air America poetry contest'') fans have been buzzing excitedly all over the Internet about the experimentation on this release.

Who would have expected a horn section from a co-founder of the seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo? There is an electric sitar here, and -- what is this? An electric bouzouki? (Farrar explains it's basically an oversized, eight-string mandolin.)

A broad array of keyboards, from church organ to electric piano, give Son Volt, traditionally a guitar band, unprecedented texture.

And on stage, the versatile keyboardist Derry deBorja laces older songs with electronically generated facsimiles of country sounds, like pedal steel.

''When you play hundreds of live shows with pedal steel guitar, the instinctual thing to do is to move in a different direction,'' Farrar said during an interview at the storied Fillmore concert venue in San Francisco.

''At this point I was ready to get back to playing some of the instrumentation that I'd spent quite a few years not necessarily trying to get away from, but (I was) trying to follow wherever the inspiration was going,'' he said.

The result is an ambitious collection that fuses new sounds (for him) with old.

GRIM YET UPBEAT

The second song on the album, ''The Picture,'' might even find a place on pop radio, with its perky trumpets and saxophones, unlikely but winning partners to guitars on a driving rock song. It's the kind of upbeat tune you want to hear first thing in the morning, notwithstanding the grim lyrics: ''Where truth gets twisted in danger of dissolving/When war is profit and profit is war.''

''Having a horn section is always something I'd wanted to do, but I never really knew a horn section,'' Farrar says. ''Probably the inspiration for trying a horn section was listening to the Rolling Stones and their horn section.''

Even his voice is fodder for experimentation. Farrar, a soft-spoken, intensely shy man, pushes his range out of the comfortable low end and into a higher range that complements some of the keyboards.

The opening song, ''Slow Hearse,'' finds an altogether new Farrar voice, and partly by accident. ''I was actually kind of sick during that period, so it gave it a little bit more of a nasally -- some nasally, high frequencies a chance to poke out.''

There is also a smattering of rootsy material, lest Farrar freak his core audience out too much.

NOT BANGING HIS FIST

''Highways and Cigarettes'' is the timeless jewel of this album, the song that transports the listener to a lonely desert town: ''Still out there with the coffee stains, and putting miles on shoes, Can't escape the smell of cigarettes, Still living out these American late-night blues,'' Farrar sings, in a heart-rending harmony with Shannon McNally.

The song stands shoulder to shoulder with anything Farrar wrote in the heart of his alt-country days -- and it even has a subtle electric piano, a new touch.

An abundance of material let Farrar stretch the boundaries on each one, he says.

''There were more songs to work with this time, and that sort of allowed things to diversify and maybe be a little more expansive,'' he says. The volume of songs ''meant for each song we did, we tried to essentially say, 'OK, we've done this instrumentation on this song, let's try something else on the next one.' It kind of just feeds on itself.''

In the interview and later onstage, Farrar wore a Western shirt, the kind with the faux pearl buttons like you'd find patrons wearing in a Texas two-stepping bar, except this one was black -- a punk touch, along with the heavy key chain dangling off his belt.

Farrar brushes off the notion that he is banging his fists against the confines of alt-country.

''I try not to fixate on that at all. I know that term alternative country or Americana is always going to be there,'' he says. ''It may not always apply to what the music sounds like, but that's just the way it is. I just try to stay focused on the actual creative aspect of it.''

asap contributor Scott Lindlaw covers homeland security in the AP's San Francisco bureau. He was in a band that covered a Son Volt song or two.