‘Jasper County’ shows Yearwood’s strength, reliability

Trisha Yearwood”Jasper County” (MCA Nashville) •••

Trisha Yearwood has been one of Nashville’s premier songbirds for nearly 15 years, always distinctive among a crowd of big-voiced wailers for her reliable balance of power and character.

Her approach is unchanged on her first album in more than four years. “Jasper County” is an assortment of well-chosen tunes that showcase the Georgia native’s strengths and survey a variety of stylistic niches.

Yearwood’s voice is elegant and rich with emotive spirit, relaxed but still sufficiently precise to fill out the mellow “Trying To Love You.” She gets loose and feisty amid the hammered piano of the rambunctious honky-tonk tune “Pistol,” and her clear tone meshes pleasantly with the bright energy of guest Ronnie Dunn alongside the whining pedal steel guitar of “Try Me.”

Her singing is almost too crisp to smolder with the sizzling electric guitar on “Sweet Love,” but the assertiveness with which she handles lyrics serves her well there and on such perky fare as “Baby Don’t You Let Go.”

New challenges are few within such safe territory as the reflective, wistful “Georgia Rain,” but her range is wide enough that she travels in a number of interesting directions even when confined to a comfort zone.

Thomas Kintner, Hartford Courant

Shaggy

“Clothes Drop” (Geffen/Big Yard) •• 1/2

When “Dutty Rock,” the 2002 dancehall reggae album by Sean Paul, went double platinum, Shaggy’s reputation took a beating. Though he has outsold any other dancehall act, reggae fans murmured that compared with Paul’s pure patois flow, Shaggy’s singsong choruses and semipatois verses sounded inauthentic.

“Clothes Drop,” Shaggy’s sixth studio album, is an uneven collection, but it easily rebuts that argument, proving that as a reggae vocalist he is as bona fide as they come.

Shaggy is famous for taking a Jamaican-American musical hybrid mainstream, but on this set, his Jamaican roots steal the show.

Baz Dreisinger, Los Angeles Times

Ben Taylor

“Another Run Around the Sun” (Iris) •••

From his father, James Taylor, he inherited the voice – that instantly recognizable warm, laid-back way with a story. From his mother, Carly Simon, he got a sense of melody. Like both, he focuses on relationship-oriented material.

On the most ambitious cut, “Think a Man Would Know,” Taylor borrows the coda from a tune his parent wrote together, “Terra Nova” – which originally appeared on his father’s 1977 album “JT” – singing the borrowed phrase with his sister Sally Taylor, then cleverly wrapping a new song around it.

Howard Cohen, Miami Herald

Nada Surf

“The Weight Is a Gift” (Barsuk) ••• 1/2

Nada Surf may never again be so popular as it was in 1996, when “Popular,” its satire of high school social hierarchies, made the band just that. But what the New York melodic rockers have achieved in years hence – survival of the one-hit-wonder jinx, and mastery of the catchy, upbeat, really sad song – is a far greater thing.

“The Weight Is a Gift” takes its place alongside “Let Go” (2002) as a series of deliciously bittersweet power-pop nuggets. The real keeper here is the fetching “Your Legs Grow,” in which singer Matthew Caws mysteriously ruminates about love, loss, and a dip in the swimming hole over an uncannily haunting melody.

Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer