Martina McBride has long been a champion of music as social consciousness, particularly for abused women ("Independence Day") and children. On Waking Up Laughing, her ninth album and the follow-up to Timeless, her platinum-selling album of country classics, she advances the theme while expanding it. While two songs explore the issue of unwed mothers (particularly the exquisite "Love Land," which closes the album), and another, "Beautiful Again," touches on child sexual abuse, her overall repertoire embraces the wholeness of family, and of standing strong together in the face of adversity and defeat. Musically, McBride has always proved to be an elegant thorn-her song selection is often inspired (and here, she co-wrote three tunes, including the skyscraping single "Anyway"), but she has tended to use her huge, ride-the-wave soprano full-tilt, without employing the subtle shadings that would make her even more emotionally resonant. On Waking Up Laughing she seems to have worked on the problem, yet in her second foray as solo producer, she still tends to gild the lily instrumentally-inflating string bridges between choruses, for example, or loading the opening country-pop track, "If I Had Your Name," with a Southern-rock guitar break, a listen-to-me fiddle showcase, a Celtic guitar intro, and a close that brings to mind George Harrison's sitar in play-it-backward mode. That said, she makes fine use of what sounds like a black female choir on the uplifting "For These Times," and wisely keeps the haunting break-up ballad "Tryin' to Find a Reason" (with Keith Urban's harmony vocals and guitar solo) lean and affecting. As McBride works to refine her pastiche of creativity, commerciality, and social awareness, she slyly takes more chances than one might think, all the while rallying old fans and making new ones. -Alanna Nash.

The snappily-titled debut Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot signified the emergence of a major talent. Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous was one of an encouraging vanguard of young American songwriters (see also 16 Horsepower, Grant Lee Buffalo, Uncle Tupelo, Nadine) attempting to wrench the legacy of Hank Williams out of the clammy grip of Nashville's legion of anodyne Garth Brooks clones and redefine American music for a new age. The fact that Linkous owed as big a debt to the likes of Pavement and Sebadoh only served to make his music more interesting. The songs on this album, simple enough ballads at heart, came dressed in a wildly varied array of effects and distortions, all astutely judged to accentuate, rather than distract from, Linkous's lyrics of loss and hope. A great start. -Andrew Mueller.

It seems incredible, listening to this album, that Lambchop were ever accused of being a country band. but then, Lambchop didn't used to make records that sounded like this. The immediate predecessor of Is A Woman, 2000's superb Nixon, saw Lambchop exploring a fascination with soul music, and the journey continues on Is a Woman. It is cut from the same cloth as Nixon, but it's just a little more threadbare. Where Nixon was a sequence of vast, shimmering electronic soundscapes, much of Is a Woman is carried by little more than piano and guitar. The songs are therefore left to fend for themselves, and they live up to the confidence placed in them. The lack of instrumental competition also allows Kurt Wagner's singular voice to sound even more vulnerable and wracked than usual: "Bugs", for example, might well be the most underplayed lead vocal in the history of popular music. As a whole, Is a Woman is best thought of as a companion volume to Tindersticks' Can Our Love. [+]

Being for years considered too folky for country fans and too country for folkies, Nanci Griffith-who first began performing in public in the late 1960s-did not achieve major Stateside success until 1994, when she won a Grammy for Other Voices, Other Rooms. Before this, throughout the 1980s, she had found her most receptive audience in the UK and especially Ireland, and Wings To Fly. is a collection drawn from the albums recorded at that time: Storms, Lone Star State Of Mind, Little Love Affairs, Once In A Very Blue Moon and the live, endlessly charming One Fair Summer Evening. Tastefully compiled, the album features such Griffith classics as "Outbound Plane", "It's A Hard Life Wherever You Go" and her delicate but famously stirring cover of Julie Gold's "From A Distance", and is an undeniable testament to her strength as a songwriter. Inhabiting the wide-open terrain between Dolly Parton and Joni Mitchell, she is genuinely an artist of world class, and this is an excellent introduction. -Dominic Wills.