Mojave 3 has just wrapped up a brief promotional outing for its new album, "Excuses For Travellers," and the British group is already mulling plans for a return jaunt early next year, fueled by the recent shows and the record's reception on alternative and college radio.

"Excuses For Travellers" is currently ensconced in the top 10 of both the "CMJ" Radio and Core Radio charts, and Mojave 3 recently told MTV News that the haggard, world-weary sound of the album was, in part, a reaction to its previous effort, 1998's "Out Of Tune."

"I think we wanted to make something that was a little rawer sounding than 'Out Of Tune,'" offered frontman Neil Halstead.

As Mojave 3 tends to craft and base its songs around acoustic and pedal steel guitars, the band's music has been described as country by way of Cornwall. Halstead said that while he was comfortable with such a characterization, the members of Mojave 3 certainly weren't "muzo" students of country music and didn't pass the time by obsessing over and dissecting old Hank Williams records.

"In some ways, country music is about just taking a song back to its barest, [most] minimum sort of components," Halstead explained.

"With Mojave, we haven't really gone and pushed the production in any sort of direction, and yet it has pedal steel on it, so it sort of becomes country music," he continued. "I don't mind, that's fine, whatever. At the end of the day, you can label it however you want. My only concern would be that people wouldn't listen to it because they don't like country music, which I think would be the wrong decision." [RealAudio]

During Mojave 3's recent New York City show, the band wowed audiences with an epochal reading of "My Life In Art," a seven-minute track off "Excuses For Travellers" that was inspired by the band's U.S. tour last year with Gomez, as well as by fractured American crooners Tom Waits and Lou Reed.

Halstead said, "and just some weird nights in Santa Fe. But when we were doing it, we were thinking that was our Tom Waits song, sort of a 'The Heart Of Saturday Night'-type thing, which I love. I love all that, but you can only really do that if you're authentically American.

"The whole song is really about how you romanticize about America," he added, "or you might romanticize about Europe, or you might glamorize being in a band, or you might glamorize anyone's profession. I suppose something like 'Walk On The Wild Side' isn't too far off the general feel of what we were trying to do, just from an English point of view." [RealAudio]