TRISHA YEARWOOD”Everybody Knows”MCA* * *Yearwood has a...

TRISHA YEARWOOD

“Everybody Knows”

MCA

* * *

Yearwood has a voice like butta: smooth, uncomplicated, gently sweet and sinfully rich. She could sing the phone book, as the cliche goes, and still seduce us. Fortunately, Yearwood has better material than that to work with on her sixth album. Most of the songs here--contributed by a number of top Nashville writers, including Kevin Welch and Matraca Berg--deal with those time-honored themes of love and loss, country-style. Few of them offer any revelations, but their candor and unpretentious charm are ideally suited to Yearwood’s pure, stunning delivery.

On such mid-tempo numbers as the sunny, buoyant “I Want to Live Again” and the driving “Believe Me Baby (I Lied),” Yearwood mixes a feisty quality with wistful ambivalence, her voice alternately caressing and soaring over the gritty but tasteful arrangements. It’s on the ballads, though, that the sumptuous warmth of Yearwood’s singing is most pronounced. On the melancholy “I Need You,” she expresses heartache with such grace and beauty that the overall effect is inspiring rather than depressing. And on “Maybe It’s Love,” a richly melodic account of unexpected romance, her direct, understated approach is worth a zillion glissandi in emotional depth. With music, as with food, sometimes the simplest things are the tastiest.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).