Shelby Lynne: Love, Shelby

After family tragedy and more than a decade on the outskirts of Nashville success, Shelby Lynne finally hit it big with last year's slick, assured I Am Shelby Lynne. The disc's accessible mix of country and Sheryl Crow-style radio rock made Lynne a minor star and won her the Best New Artist Grammy, but it's hard to glean exactly what she's going for with the hotly anticipated Love, Shelby. Lynne asserted her toughness and independence throughout I Am, but she casts herself as a cheesecake pinup in every element of Love's garish packaging, most notably the cover art, which features a conspicuously placed mirror to provide a rear view. Then, to offset the artwork's implication that this is Britney Spears' new record—the cover of which, incidentally, is far more restrained—the disc's 10 tracks (three were excised at the last minute) blur into a dispiriting, middle-of-the-road mishmash of lite pop, lite country, lite rock, and lite adult-contemporary. Alanis Morissette hitsmith Glen Ballard co-wrote six of Love's songs, in a mismatch of sensibilities appropriate for an album and artist in the midst of a profound and wholly unexpected identity crisis. The smooth pop-soul track "Bend" has breezy appeal, but elsewhere, the collaboration obliterates I Am Shelby Lynne's confidence and focus, revealing a tentative artist so eager to please that she forgot what made her a success in the first place. The pop-cultural dustbin overflows with Best New Artist Grammy winners, but until Love, Shelby came along, Lynne seemed virtually immune to that legendary curse. The Grammy jinx may explain as well as anything why her creative spark has been so quickly and decisively extinguished.