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Carrie Underwood album doesn't blow you away - USA TODAY

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

Updated

Carrie Underwood has a lovely country-pop voice and a winningly sweet, self-effacing manner. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to assign her an artistic personality beyond that.

  • Carrie Underwood's singing is impeccable on her fourth album, 'Blown Away,' but there's a lack of excitement.

    Carrie Underwood's singing is impeccable on her fourth album, 'Blown Away,' but there's a lack of excitement.

Carrie Underwood's singing is impeccable on her fourth album, 'Blown Away,' but there's a lack of excitement.

Certainly, the songs on her new album, Blown Away (* * * out of four) cover a range of emotions and experience, and Underwood co-wrote some intriguing ones. In the pulsing Two Black Cadillacs, a man's widow and mistress meet at his funeral after sharing a secret phone conversation; Good in Goodbye charts a failed romance with two happy endings.

Underwood's singing, as usual, is impeccable â€" technically supple and elegant but full of girlish pluck. Even when working a clichéd concept, she's at once impressive and authentic.

That's not quite the same thing as exciting. But at 29, Underwood still has a lot of growing to do; Blown Away both reaffirms her natural gifts and makes us continue to root for her to push beyond them.

>Download:Good in Goodbye, Two Black Cadillacs

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