Carrie Underwood Storyteller

Carrie Underwood sticks with a proven pop-country formula on her fifth album, a slick collection that showcases her strong voice along with the bombastic production that’s helped her chart numerous hit singles. Underwood is a fantastic singer, but the songwriting and production on her albums seem stuck in ’90s-Aerosmith mode. The songs are either bludgeoning arena rock with insidious hooks and the minimum amount of country-qualifying twang, or they’re drippy ballads with cloying inspirational lyrics. Storyteller’s best songs recall bolder country artists, like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves on the working-class ode “Smoke Break” or the Dixie Chicks on domestic violence revenge story “Church Bells” (or Underwood herself on “Dirty Laundry,” an update of mega-hit “Before He Cheats”). Storyteller lives up to its title on the pounding, bluesy murder ballads “Choctaw County Affair” and “Mexico,” but more often it lives down to the measured expectations Underwood’s success has set for her.