Carrie Underwood

“STORYTELLER”

19 Recordings / Arista Nashville

At the country vocal Olympics, Carrie Underwood is a gold medalist. She had a victorious turn scream-singing on “American Idol” and has extended it into a victorious scream-singing career in Nashville. All she’s missing is the one thing Taylor Swift and Miranda Lambert have down cold: a fixed identity.

“Storyteller” is her fifth album, and even though a decade has passed since her debut, Underwood is still preoccupied with power, not texture or finesse. She largely picks songs that serve as launch platforms for her ballistic-missile voice, but they don’t cohere into a whole identity. Her voice is pure, lean, potent — it doesn’t have multiple settings. By tone alone, it can be difficult to divine when she’s ecstatic, or aggrieved, or wretched.

That means Underwood sings with equal intensity on the insipid “Heartbeat” and “The Girl You Think I Am,” an unrelentingly treacly song about being daddy’s little girl, as on the breathy, sly “Relapse,” about falling back into old habits.

If Underwood has developed a thematic specialty, it’s the woman-done-wrong anthem. The ones on this album are some of the better songs here. “Dirty Laundry” finds her catching her man in lies, and “Church Bells” is a worthy addition to country’s proud line of songs about domestic violence.

Although the song is elegantly structured and technically impressive, it still lacks bite or pulp. It’s tough not to wonder what Lambert might have done with it.

— Jon Caramanica,

New York Times