On her new album, "Carnival Ride," Carrie Underwood has done something clever: She resisted the urge to de-Carrie Underwood herself. This CD isn't full of rootsy, old-fashioned songs straining for NPR credibility. It's not a mad dash into the dance-pop mainstream. It's not an unvarnished collection of ostentatiously personal confessions.

(ENLARGE)
Carrie Underwood's new release is 'Carnival Ride.'
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Instead, it's a straight-up Carrie Underwood album, and a very good one, with a handful of romps and laments that exist mainly to set the stage for the big-voiced, '80s-influenced, Southern-accented power ballads she sings so well. Much more than any of her fellow "American Idol" winners (and more than the losers, too) she has become a mainstream pop star without much departing from that show's musical formula. When she rears back and lets the high notes fly, she still sounds as if she were out to impress the judges.

Certainly "Carnival Ride" is likely to impress the 6 million armchair judges who bought her 2005 debut album, "Some Hearts."

She's not wrong, though, to believe that one of her high notes is enough to make everything else seem inconsequential.

In "Crazy Dreams," one of a few songs she helped write, there's an electric guitar and a jolly banjo and an inspirational message: "Here's to you long shots, you dark horse runners/Hairbrush singers and dashboard drummers."

Yes, it sounds like a TV commercial. But there's a good reason TV commercials sound like that.

— Kelefa Saneh, New York Times