COUNTRY-POP
Shortly before releasing his last studio album, 2006's Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing, Keith Urban checked himself into rehab, spending 90 days in an alcohol treatment program. Wrestling with those kinds of demons is the stuff that great country songs are made of. But you have to wait all the way until the last cut of his new CD for any hint of it. "Like a fool I thought that I could fight/ The shadows on my own/ To the dark I was no stranger/ But this was stronger than I'd known," he sings on "Thank You," a confessional ballad addressed to wife Nicole Kidman. Elsewhere, he keeps things pretty breezy, but you keep hoping for a little more, well, gravity from the guy.
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