J Mascis spoke once about the music of his band, Dinosaur Jr., and noted that while they prefer to crank the volume up to hard-rock extremes, the music that they play is, at heart, country music. This is cute and clever shorthand for describing exactly what separates Dinosaur from their alt-rock peers, and it is both easy and accurate: there’s something about Mascis’ laconic (and by now, iconic) drawl and the lilt of his melodies that makes it seem, at times, like he’s a honky tonk singer who somehow stumbled into the central role in a rock band. I remember thinking about this kind of odd stylistic mash-up when I first heard the great Beyond track “Crumble,” and thinking that, if you stripped it of its drums and its electricity, what you’d have left would basically be a nice little folksy country song.

When Mascis announced his intentions to do a largely-acoustic solo album, I assumed — as did many fans, I would guess — that it would play out as sort of the inverse of a Dinosaur Jr. album — that it would feature nice little folksy country songs, in other words, that one could quite easily imagine as full-band Dinosaur Jr. songs, simply minus the roar and the electricity. And I would be fine with that. But Several Shades of Why — despite its quintessentially anxious, neurotic J Mascis lyrics and its stoner-friendly, Farm-like cover art — is something rather different. It isn’t merely an act of simplification, but also of expansion; Mascis dismantles his music of its rock-and-roll energy and volume, but he also deepens its roots in different kinds of acoustic music. He reveals his palette to include several shades more than one might have expected.

The opening track, then, is something of a Led Zeppelin III/”Immigrant’s Song”-styled red herring. It makes you think this is a just a different flavor of Dinosaur Jr., concealing, momentarily, the fact that the rest of the music on the album broadens its engagement with different acoustic shades and styles. “Listen to Me,” with its warm, folksy boom, slight twang, and weary vocal and lyric is, basically, a Dinosaur Jr. song; it could fit on any of the band’s albums, with or without additional volume.

There are only a couple of others songs that can be easily imagined as anything even approaching vintage Dinosaur. “Very Nervous and Love,” which bears a title that could basically be a parody of J. Mascis, or of Woody Allen for that matter, begins as a ball of pent-up anxiety and pensive strumming. But it unravels a bit as it goes on, opening itself to include a sort of Eastern-tinged jangle. The glistening number “Where Are You” is almost a proper country song, perhaps more than anything to ever make it onto a Dino album, with a twangy, finger-picked melody and some welcome electric guitar soloing.

What’s left is, in large part, a series of departures, albeit subtle ones. This is modest and self-contained music that constantly shies away from demonstrating how varied or expansive it is; even its roster of guest musicians — which includes Kurt Vile and members of Broken Social Scene and Band of Horses — is downplayed to the extent that you probably won’t be figure out who is contributing to which song, though the communal nature of the thing is heard clearly on the standout track “Not Enough,” a sort of folksy, campfire sing-along that rides atop an amiable tambourine beat.

For the most part, Mascis displays his own musical curiosities in as modest a way as possible; the title cut is a sprightly little thing with flavors of English folk and elegant string accompaniment, though you might not notice either of these if you’re not paying close attention, to restrained is the arrangement. Some of the later songs stand out a bit more, dipping a bit more openly into a mystic version of Americana — namely, the almost trance-like “Make it Right,” complete with a floating-on-air flute solo. The modest scale of this music might, to some extent, be a detriment, if only because some listeners will write it off as rock-gone-acoustic, but the joy of it lies in simply letting it wash over you—and to reveal its depth, its breadth, and its many surprises along the way.