Carrie Underwood - Blown Away Review

"Blown Away," the singer's fourth album, has been described as a turn toward darkness from a singer who first topped the country chart with "Jesus, Take the Wheel." And insofar as the moody title track finds her willing death-by-tornado upon an abusive father, that's true. (Elsewhere, "Two Black Cadillacs" offers a bleaker spin on the revenge fantasy in Underwood's 2006 smash "Before He Cheats.") Mostly, though, "Blown Away" finds her using her remarkable voice to deliver feel-good bromides like those in the lightly reggae-inflected "One Way Ticket": "Life is like a ride on a party bus," "It matters where you're going, not where you been," "We're headed to a heaven where the beat don't stop." Who knew the victor's circle would be so dull?...full text Carrie Underwood's Blown Away is an album clearly made for more than country radio. Sure, Good Girl is already burning up the charts, and the album has enough singles to fuel that format for a couple of years -- and tracks like Cupid's Got a Shotgun and Leave Love Alone will give programmers as much twang as they want, should they decide they want to go that direction. But with Blown Away's broad range of styles, somebody's thinking about broadening Carrie's fan base, even if Carrie says that wasn't an intentional goal while she was cutting the album.
Blown Away's sequencing almost suggests four EPs and a bonus track -- the trio of dark, dramatic songs that start the album, a brief foray into a catchy acoustic country-pop, a couple of ballads, some throwback country, then a Mutt Lange tune that pops up out of nowhere. Whatever type of country music you like -- or even if you think you don't -- Carrie's got something for you here. After winning American Idol and selling more than 12 million albums to date, she's already the country star that everybody knows. With Blown Away, her best album since 2005's Some Hearts and maybe ever, she seems to want to become the country star that everybody loves....full text As expected, the cover of Carrie Underwood‘s ‘Blown Away’ album foreshadows the mood of the project’s 14 songs (eight co-written by Underwood). It stops short of tempestuous, but she spends more time looking back at the darkness than she does forward to sunny days.

That said, there will be few finer collections of songs on a country album this year. Between her work with a pen and the work of many other fine Nashville writers, Underwood is able to paint vivid emotional portraits with just a few vocal brush strokes. ‘Blown Away’ and ‘Two Black Cadillacs,’ for example, will get all praise, as they hypnotize you with eerie stories of betrayal, abuse and murder....full text Blown Away, comes on like a tornado with its first three songs.

There's the guitar-charged single "Good Girl," which, with all of its rock bluster, is maybe the least country thing she's ever done. Then there's the windswept title track, an over-the-top tale about a twister wiping out the house where an alcoholic father abused his daughter.

Underwood keeps in melodramatic mode with "Two Black Cadillacs," a macabre revenge song. You may be exhausted after getting through all of that, but brace yourself for more overproduced, under-nuanced action – this is big-hair country. Fortunately, though, relief comes in the wistful, piano-laced "Forever Changed." ...full text