Carrie Underwood - NYT album review

[Miguel]

“Blown Away,” the new album by Carrie Underwood, the shiny but tough country star, starts out loud, sassy, rollicking and wise. “Good Girl” is the first song — a little Pat Benatar, a little Tanya Tucker — and it plays out like a sequel to Ms. Underwood’s 2006 smash “Before He Cheats,” except, instead of taking out her rightfully stoked dissatisfaction on her ex, she opts for unity and warns the next woman instead.

After that it’s a one-two punch of brutality: a quick-paced “Blown Away,” in which a young woman hides in her basement, waiting out a tornado that she hopes her abusive, alcoholic father sleeping upstairs doesn’t survive; followed by “Two Black Cadillacs,” in which a wife and a mistress conspire to kill the man they share, not a murder ballad so much as a murder celebration.

Ms. Underwood enjoys rage; her huge voice, both naïve and muscular, is well suited to it. Her best songs have historically been in the range between fury and resentment.

...While the album starts bold and mechanically impressive, it gets progressively quieter over the course of its first half, as if she were taking a break from fire-breathing. “Do You Think About Me” is tepid; “Nobody Ever Told You” is bland and blithe; and “One Way Ticket” — part Jimmy Buffett, part Jason Mraz — is Ms. Underwood at her least convincing. Relaxation is not her milieu. She needs muscles pulled taut, veins popping through the skin. Hearing her sing about flip-flops and drinks with pink umbrellas is an affront.

“Blown Away” builds steam again from that point. Ms. Underwood holds back her voice on “Good in Goodbye,” which has echoes of “So Small,” her inspirational 2007 hit. But by the rowdy and sinister “Cupid’s Got a Shotgun,” her nostrils are practically flaring:

I pulled out my Remington

And I loaded up these shells

He’s about to find out

I’m a dang good shot myself.

On a few of this album’s early songs , a perplexing number of digital effects are applied to Ms. Underwood’s vocals, processing she neither needs nor benefits from, even if it is par for the course for other country singers. She may be unhappy, but hearing her tense up is half the fun.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/arts/m...-away.html