Andy Friedman in a China shop

The last year was a rough one for urban cowboys in New York City. First, Robert “The Naked Cowboy” Burck sued Mars Incorporated, manufacturer of M&Ms, after a blue M&M appeared on billboards similarly dressed in white briefs and a bucket hat. Then, Johnny Utah’s—a Manhattan bar that boasts the borough’s only mechanical bull—found itself staring down the horns of a pair of lawsuits after a few patrons were tossed from the toro. The only gaucho that felt O.K. in this corral, it seems, was Andy Friedman.

In fact, Friedman—a former New Yorker cartoonist turned musician—is a sort of mechanical bull: a gruff-snorting beast restricted to a few simple moves but capable of more than a few gut-busting surprises. Taken Man, Friedman’s 2006 record, loosed him as a modest musician with a knack for one-liners, like comedian Steven Wright fronting a weeknight bar act. But despite the enjoyable handful of down-but-not-quite-out odes to smart-assery and dusty trail vocals, Taken Man occasionally felt a bit like Friedman wasn’t quite seeing red and, if he was, didn’t quite know how to gore the matador.

With Weary Things, however, Friedman sharpens his horns and starts to throw his weight around. The Brooklyn bull’s second proper album and first with his committed ranch hands, the Other Failures, still busts buckaroo balls, but does something a bit more interesting for listeners that hang on for the ride. Weary Things shows more of Friedman in the music; it plays out like the biography of a beaten animal, rocked hard and put away late, but pleased with the ache in its mechanical joints.

Of course, the Brooklyn bull needs a China shop to tear down, and the proprietor of Weary Things is Friedman’s former college roommate and locally based songwriter Paul Curreri, credited on the album for a dozen or so instruments in addition to his gig as mixer and producer. Curreri spent a fair deal of time behind the boards during the last few years, and his work has taken a few unpredictable sonic steps. (Dig up his cover Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire” and listen to the reverb on that banjo for a taste.)

Here, Curreri primes Friedman for a different kind of wreckage. Opening country blues cut “I Miss Being Broken, Lowdown and Alone” shuffles over cannon volley drums while the Brooklyn bull pines for “the ivory quiet sound of pain in my bones.” Lead single “Idaho” stirs up a simple wanderlust chant—a drive to return to states that end in “-o” makes for memorable rhymes—and pairs it with a shiftless guitar line that lazily circles the neighborhood rather than hopping into the frenzy of the Interstate.

A pair of “Road Trippin’” tunes—one eponymous, one retitled “Road Trippin’ Daddy”—split the pros and cons of Friedman’s tour-heavy years. The rockabilly of the first version emphasizes both the frequency and flippancy of Friedman’s lyrical middle finger; the second take, “Daddy,” replaces the beer-bellied bass line with a weary classical guitar and a pleasantly dazed drum kit for a different scene altogether, one that sounds more kid-in-a-crib than Coors Light.

Weary Things isn’t a perfect ride. A bit of chatty filler near the record’s center might rain on Matt Walsh’s soot-breathed guitar solo in the following track, “Pilot Light.” And while a few one-liners and the punchline chorus of the bar memorial “Freddy’s Backroom” is a hoot, it’s a distraction from the creature at the center of the Weary Things rodeo.

But the album’s final pair of proper tunes leave the Brooklyn bull beyond his pen of reflexive one-liners and lonesome-for-loneliness ballads. In the title track, Friedman wanders across desolate drums and holds out a hoof to a mate for solidarity. And in “Weary Apology,” Friedman looks back at a younger calf—“Every quarter mile was my natural friend/…the leaves rustled up the tune of The Natural score”—over a lost E Street Band piano and decides the apology he set out to make isn’t in him.

And then he ends the record with a live recording of the ball-busting “Friedman Holler.” The man’s a bull, after all.

Andy Friedman & the Other Failures performs at Gravity Lounge on Thursday, January 22, at 8pm. Tickets are $5-8.