More of Carrie's Kind of Country On This 'Ride'

The first track of Carrie Underwood's new album, "Carnival Ride," opens with twanging banjo and sawing fiddle, but as soon as the buzzing guitars and bashing 4/4 rhythm kick in, the song announces itself as more Southern rock than country. After that, the record settles into a familiar, and mostly rewarding, pop-country groove.

Heartening anthems predominate, which is hardly surprising from a big-voiced "American Idol" winner whose debut album sold 6 million copies by trading in the very same thing.

The Hallmark quotient runs a little high at times, such as in "All-American Girl," a cantering reworking of Trisha Yearwood's "She's in Love With the Boy" written from the guy's point of view. Similarly, platitudes like "When you figure out love is all that matters after all/It sure makes everything else seem so small" (from "So Small") might be great for the frog-kissing Cinderellas of whom Underwood likes to sing. For real people with real problems, though, such monuments to pluck and uplift have to ring hollow.

Thankfully, "Just a Dream," the wrenching lament of an 18-year-old war widow, injects a dose of reality into the proceedings. "Baby, why'd you leave me/Why'd you have to go?/I was countin' on forever/Now I'll never know/I can't even breathe," Underwood wails on the track's chorus.

A far different, but equally welcome, change of pace the pop-dance tracks that anchor the likes of "Crazy Dreams" and "You Won't Find This." Country purists doubtless won't approve, but we're talking about an "American Idol" winner here, not Loretta Lynn. It's refreshing, in any case, to hear a modern record that actually sounds like one, as opposed to the '80s rock retreads that now dominate the commercial country airwaves.

As on her previous album, Underwood's voluptuous soprano is the main event. She reaches for the rafters more often than she has to, especially on the record's many swooning choruses and bridges, where she tends to favor pyrotechnics over nuance. On "So Small," for example, she holds out the notes of the chorus a bar or two too long before adding an extraneous round of "yeah, yeah, yeah," reducing an otherwise gorgeous passage to melodrama and clutter.

Still, there's no denying the power and beauty of Underwood's instrument, a strapping and supple voice akin to those of Yearwood and Martina McBride. Some contemporary country stars might be little more than well-paid karaoke singers working with unproven material, but as the best tracks here attest, Underwood more than has the goods. The more judiciously she uses them, and the more she lends them to songs steeped in real-world struggle, the sooner she'll earn her place alongside the proven likes of Trisha and Martina.

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Just a Dream," "Flat on the Floor"