Carrie Underwood, guitar-playing blonde lady (not the one Kanye stole the mic from at the VMAs), completes the disintegration of country as a genre with her new album Play On. She has mastered what that classification has come to mean: an amalgamation of modern R&B, '70s folk rock and Christian contemporary. The only true holdover from the music of Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams, Sr. is the instrumental garnish: pedal steel, banjo, fiddle, all polished to a glossy studio sheen.
These jams go wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Young Carrie has a firm grasp on our zeitgeist, writing songs on decidedly first-world problems. For example, there’s bad boyfriends on the stomping glam rock of “Cowboy Casanova” and late-night Sally Struthers “Feed the Children” guilt trips on “Change.” That song implores the audience to reject apathy for ineffectual charity as Underwood sings, “For a dime a day you can save a life.”
But the topicality doesn’t stop there. No, no. The whole album is a paean to Sun Belt living cut short by Bush’s second term, Iraq and the faltering economy. It is a celebration of the glory that was and an acknowledgement of modern realities and dingy apartments (“Temporary Home”).
It verges on schmaltz from time to time, but Ms. Underwood really sells it. And if it comes off as derivative, it’s because she has learned from the best: shades of the Police, AC/DC, Shania Twain, Eddie Money and Fleetwood Mac are all in evidence.
While this record is certainly the crowning achievement of the American Idol industrial complex, what is not certain is whether this is the country equivalent of Tha Carter III, or the one album that might unseat Reign in Blood as my apocalypse-scenario soundtrack of choice.