from Dallas Morning News Entertainment on dallasnews.com

Over in Oklahoma, where the red-dirt country music movement lives and breathes, a five-man band called No Justice likes to inject plenty of soul into its Southern rocking sound. As evidence, listen to the 10 tracks on 2nd Avenue, the just-released fourth album from the group led by singer-songwriter Steve Rice.

In the midst of the no-pretense style, solid musicianship and country-rock songs is a rugged R&B vibe that comes through not only in Rice's robust pipes, but also in the melodic swagger of the music.

From band member to band member, we have real diverse musical backgrounds and histories," Rice, 33, says by phone from his Stillwater, Okla., home. "We can really bring those sounds together and make something original, like nothing else. We have a lot of jazz backgrounds throughout the band, some metal, some rock, some blues. We don't really want to classify ourselves as genre-specific so that the audience doesn't get tired of it and we don't get tired of playing it. With each record that we've made we experiment a little bit more outside the boundaries of the previous record."

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