LADY ANTEBELLUM
Need You Now
(Capitol Nashville)
The best song on Need You Now the second album by the wildly successful soft-country trio Lady Antebellum, is “When You Got a Good Thing,” which oozes regret like a scraped-up 1980s Don Henley number. Except in one way: Lady Antebellum never gets to the hurt. As on many of its songs, a danger is looming — “Hold on to the love we’re making/’cause baby when the ground starts shaking” — but it never arrives. It feels hypothetical.
Because they eschew trauma altogether, Lady Antebellum’s songs allow the group — Hillary Scott, Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood — to sing about heartbreak cheerily, as it did so effectively on its 2008 self-titled debut album, on the cut “All We’d Ever Need” and particularly the hit “Love Don’t Live Here.” Here the lead vocal duties largely trade off between the sweet-voiced Ms. Scott, heavy with the enunciation and little patience for grace notes, and Mr. Kelley, who gets better as he gets muddier though he rarely aims for that.
On “If I Knew Then,” from the new album, Lady Antebellum at least appears genuinely hurt and sluggish, though the lyrics detail a catalog of unspecific remorse: again the pain is vague. Its attempts at gravitas — “Hello World,” on which Mr. Kelley sets a promising scene (“Traffic crawls, cellphone calls, talk radio screams at me”) that doesn’t resolve — land awkwardly, and its optimistic songs, like “Our Kind of Love,” teem with empty metaphor: “Just like driving on an open highway/Never knowing what we’re going to find.”
For this group naming the feeling is more important than detailing how one gets there, which means that even at its best, as it is sometimes on this album, Lady Antebellum is rarely more than blithe. The only place the group breaks free of its own dignity is “Love This Pain,” one of this album’s most raucous musical numbers and, crucially, the one on which Mr. Kelley digs into his lower register, closer to soul music than country. He lasts there maybe a good five seconds before retreating back to the haze.
JON CARAMANICA