Breathing Fire With Ballads - New York Times

“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 â€" a little Pat Benatar, a little Tanya Tucker â€" 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. “Blown Away” is only her fourth album, but that number belies her concrete-hard place in the country firmament, with a combination of vocal ambition and toughness that recalls a younger Martina McBride.

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” â€" part Jimmy Buffett, part Jason Mraz â€" 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.

CHELLE ROSE

“Ghost of Browder Holler”

(Lil’ Damsel)

“I don’t know who I trouble more / The mean old Devil or the good old Lord,” Chelle Rose sings on her second album, “Ghost of Browder Holler,” and she’s bragging more than worrying. It’s an album filled with rasp, drawl, twang and tenacity.

Ms. Rose (whose first name is pronounced as “Shelly”) grew up in East Tennessee (where Browder Holler is) and lives in Nashville. She released her first album, “Nanahally River,” in 2000, then withdrew into family life. “Alimony” may or may not be a song about what eventually happened; its snarling electric guitars back the tale of a woman who leaves a stultifying suburban marriage to be a musician.

“I wasn’t askin’ for much, just make some noise with my boys,” she sings. “He was supposed to be my lover, we was Hatfield and McCoys.”

As a songwriter, Ms. Rose works in the realm of Lucinda Williams, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Alejandro Escovedo and other terse, unflinching songwriters on the rock fringe of country. She sings about hard-nosed characters â€" herself, perhaps, among them â€" and ways to face tough situations, and the answer is as much in the grain of her voice and the sinewy guitars as in her words.

The album was produced in Austin by the Texas-based songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard, who links country to the Rolling Stones, the Band and the Staple Singers. “Rufus Morgan (Preacher Man)” is Southern soul, while “I Need You,” a song by Julie Miller, hints at “Gimme Shelter.”

Although the album was made in Texas, the songs look back to rural Tennessee. Over minor-mode chords, with an Appalachian-flavored melody, Ms. Rose stares down a flood in “Shady Grove Gonna Blow,” advising, “Run down to the graveyard you tell all your kin/River rises up we’ll be together again.”

In “Browder Holler Boy,” a woman’s dreams are haunted by a dead lover: “I tried to save you from the Devil’s violent brew/My skin ain’t soft enough my kisses would not do.”

There’s more sorrow and loss than solace in these songs, but Ms. Rose hasn’t given up on humanity. “If I Could,” a hymnlike song tucked quietly in the middle of the album, offers simple kindness: “Whatever it would take, I’d be willing to give,” she sings, with a stoic reality check, “If I could.” JON PARELES

DIRTY DOZEN BRASS BAND

“Twenty Dozen”

(Savoy Jazz)

Thirty-five years in, the temptation is to see the Dirty Dozen Brass Band as an engine of commerce or a piece of New Orleans culture vulgarized for tourist consumption. “Twenty Dozen,” the band’s new album, doesn’t strain to dissuade you. Recorded at the Music Shed, a prominent hometown studio, it has a bright, clear, presentable mix. It has a lot of crispness and not much grit. It has a version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

But to characterize the album as some kind of concession would be missing the point, along with the aspects of “Twenty Dozen” that reflect a band chugging at full steam. Five of the seven original members of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band are still in the group, a remarkable retention rate, even for an institution that runs on collectivity. And those charter members â€" the saxophonists Roger Lewis and Kevin Harris, the trumpeters Gregory Davis and Efrem Towns, and the sousaphone player Kirk Joseph â€" make up the band’s crucial front line. It’s no shock that as a unit, they sound impeccable here.

A lot of the material on “Twenty Dozen” is original, and much of it nods at Caribbean rhythm, from calypso (“Best of All”) to lite reggae (“Tomorrow”). That buoyant feel suits the strengths of the drummer Terence Higgins and the guitarist Jake Eckert; it also clears space for solos.

What’s rarer is the counterpoint that this band can do so well. You hear it on “Jook,” over an Afrobeat pulse, but for the most part the horns move in a coordinated mass rather than a syncopated bramble.

The exception arrives during a medley that represents the band at its crowd-pleasingest: “Paul Barbarin’s Second Line” into “E-Flat Blues” into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” And to carp about that sequence of songs would be to ignore the gusto that the band still manages to bring to their execution.

The album follows “Saints” with another fan favorite, “Dirty Old Man,” featuring a gruff lead vocal by Mr. Lewis. It’s the closest thing to the experience of hearing the band at a bar like the Maple Leaf, where the blurts of the sousaphone lodge in your chest.

But then the Dirty Dozen has long broadcast at multiple frequencies. On Thursday it’s scheduled to play the largest stage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, in the slot preceding Jimmy Buffett; on Friday it will play d.b.a., a smallish club on Frenchmen Street. And both shows, at this point, are true to the spirit of the band. NATE CHINEN