Love, Shelby is actually superior in some ways to its predecessor, the universally acclaimed I Am Shelby Lynne. If anything Lynne's writing and singing are even more compelling. Producer-songwriter collaborator Glen Ballard's touch is limited mostly to stacks of electric and acoustic guitars (which seem designed to slide the songs onto contemporary radio) and the updated hip-hop shaded beats that power many cuts. Lynne's concerns are front and centre whether in the vows of emotional openness and resilience on "Wall in Your Heart", "Trust Me" and "I Can't Wait" or the intimations of Southern soul on "Bend". John Lennon's "Mother" becomes a sort of autobiography in her hands--her father killed her mother in a murder-suicide when Lynne was a teenager--until switching the song's perspective to her dad's in the final verse. Her story gives the soaring "Killin' Kind" (previously heard on the Bridget Jones's Diary soundtrack) a hint of ambivalence about romantic surrender. A couple of cuts, most obviously "Jesus on a Greyhound", succumb to the self-consciousness that marred a couple of I Am Shelby Lynne's sketches but that's a minor complaint in the face of what this record's best has to offer. --Rickey Wright