Garth Brooks

“MAN AGAINST MACHINE”

Sony Music Nashville

Considering that Garth Brooks has had 13 years to work on it — his last album, “Scarecrow,” came out in 2001 — his “Man Against Machine” contains some astonishing clunkers. Start that list with the overblown title track, which casts the 52-year-old mega-selling country-pop star as a hammer-swinging John Henry of the digital age. Include the super-saccharine “Mom” and the unabashedly corny anthem “People Loving People,” which, Brooks assures us, is the only solution for “everything that’s evil.” But is the entirety of the 14-track “Man Against Machine” as bad as all that? Hardly.

As far as the state of mainstream country music goes, the crossover-minded Oklahoman has a lot to answer for. His taste for booming drums, screaming guitars and grand arena-rock gestures provided the blueprint for the current generation of broad-stroke bro-country acts. And when you hold Brooks up in comparison, he comes off as … not that bad. There’s certainly a respect for song craft that runs through “Man Against Machine” tracks like the traveling song “Tacoma,” the smartly to-the-point “Wrong About You,” and the punny, western-swing diversion “Rodeo and Juliet.” And while Brooks’ predilection for loading songs with heavy-handed Hallmark-card life lessons — see “Fish” — can still be overbearing, he comes across as an artist of substance next to the frivolous chart-toppers that have followed his example.

— Dan DeLuca, The Philadelphia Inquirer