The good news is that Jack Johnson's third album (not counting the "Curious George" soundtrack) sounds just like a Jack Johnson album.

The bad news is that Jack Johnson's third album sounds just like a Jack Johnson album.

Fans will fall all over themselves to get their hands on "Sleep Through the Static," to be released Tuesday. And for good reason. The 14-track album is everything we love about Johnson: It's social justice to the easy tune of life-loving, sensitive-guy guitar rhythms. Only this time there's a little more down time. It's as if he used up all his up-beats on the "Curious George" soundtrack, leaving him with an arsenal of tunes that are just this side of dark.

Johnson, now accompanied by a full-time piano player (Zach Gill, who played with Johnson on his last world tour) and sometimes armed with — brace yourself — an electric guitar, is obviously, as he says in the album's opening track, overwhelmed by the world and its tendency to be full of distasteful events like war and death.

He confronts the ugliness head-on with the album's title track, a deceptively jaunty number about the Iraq war that's rife with Johnson's signature discontent with all things unpeaceful. Though he takes a brief and unfortunate detour into anti-war cliches-ville with the line "shock an awful thing to make somebody think that they have to choose pushing for peace," he more than makes up for it with the rest of the album that, like his debut record, "Brushfire Fairytales," is dense with good, solidly built lines whose preachiness is tempered by the barefoot singer's proclivity to the poetic.

In "Hope," Johnson turns inward, singing about the recent loss of a close friend to cancer, and in "Angel" he's again the family man who makes babies and banana pancakes when it's raining. Sadness and contentment. One can't exist without the other. Not in real life and not on a Jack Johnson record.

And it's while listening to songs like these that Johnson's critics can't help but bite their tongues. Because how do you dismiss a guy like Johnson — a decent musician whose music drips with sincerity and genuine concern for humanity — just because he's not interested in reinventing himself?

The short answer: You don't.

"Sleep Through the Static," is, for both lovers and leavers of Johnson's music, just what everyone thought it would be. And for most, that's pretty good news.