Album Review: Some Hearts, Carrie Underwood

Simon Cowell is wrong. Carrie Underwood will not go on to outsell Kelly Clarkson. And it won't be entirely Carrie's fault.

First off, I want to say that there is nothing inherently wrong with country music, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know all that much about it. But I know this much: if you're going to stick to country and you actually want to outsell any previous American Idol, you're going to have to shy away from the po-dunk sort. Which is what the writers behind this record chose not to do. They stuck accordingly to the tried-and-true country formula of storytelling, peppering many of the songs with "Daddy"s and "ain't"s, which hasn't been around since it went out with the last batch of late-90s boy bands.

The most blaring of "errors" is track number thirteen (already plagued), a song with a somewhat alarming title -- "I Ain't in Checotah Anymore." Checotah? I don't think some of the people who live within a 50-mile radius of Checotah know Checotah exists. The song digs itself further into a hole when lyrics like "my hotel in Manhattan holds more people than our town / and what I just paid for dinner would be a down-payment on a house / I'd rather be tipping cows in Tulsa than hailing cabs in New York ... you can get anything you want here except a Wal-mart store / but I ain't in Checotah anymore" are set to a rowdy fiddle. Honey, we ain't in Kansas no more -- we're in Checotah. This song does nothing for even the most earnest of non-Checotan Carrie fans: in the mess of embarrassing line dance music and Wal-mart worshipping, one can't help but wonder if Carrie should've ever left Checotah at all. If anyone thought this song was going to put Checotah, Oklahoma on the map like Britney did for Kentwood, Louisiana, they were terribly mistaken.

Lyrically-challenged writers aside, Carrie's vocals are strong -- but not distinctive. To a girl whose knowledge of country music includes the likes of Martina McBride and Faith Hill and extends as far as "lesser known" teen (or former teen) country singers as Jessica Andrews and Lila McCann, Carrie sounds like sixty-five percent LeAnn and thirty-five percent Jessica Andrews. Country twangs are country twangs to a city girl like me. I'm sorry.

"We're Young and Beautiful" is another travesty. Where "I Ain't in Checotah Anymore" offered amusement, "Beautiful" is completely dead on arrival. It starts out sounding like The Strangeloves' 1965 hit "I Want Candy," but turns quickly into another fiddle-driven, foot-tapping diddy. And Underwood's ad-libbing of "beautiful, beautiful, young and beautiful" gets annoying very early on. In fact, I reckon most of the people buying her album will not be young and beautiful. Cue future bitter boycotting from the friends and family of Checotah residents who bought the album because they "knew someone who knew Carrie Underwood."

But "Some Hearts" is not a lost cause. She has a few nice -- pleasing, even -- ballads in the mix, though most remain indistinguishable from one another. "Don't Forget to Remember Me" and "Whenever You Remember" have beautiful melodies, although the lyrics (and titles, certainly) need some touching up. The more forgettable songs -- the pop-meets-country midtempos ("That's Where It Is," "I Just Can't Live A Lie," "Starts With Goodbye") -- have uninteresting melodies coupled with slightly more insightful lyrics. It's a pity that the album can't seem to decide where it wants to stand and compromises meaning for melody and vice versa.

"Before He Cheats" stands out from the rest of the songs with its bittersweet yet seductive tone. Just the right mix of blues with country produces what is arguably the most appealing song of the batch. "The Night Before (Life Goes On)" comes in a close second, though its melody is not unlike many of the other songs on the album -- but Underwood's voice lifts the words off the page hauntingly and devastatingly. The title track, "Some Hearts," is as close to pop as the record gets -- dipped in the erratic bit of R&B.

Still, Underwood's single "Inside Your Heaven" is the most "generic" of songs on "Some Hearts." Misleading? Maybe. But we can't forget that the song was written so that it could've easily gone to runner-up Bo Bice. And "Some Hearts" only invites us to toy with the idea that it would've been better if it had gone to Bice.

Carrie Underwood's debut album "Some Hearts" releases on November 15th in the United States.

[Photos courtesy of Amazon.com and CarrieUnderwoodOnline.com]