Sheryl Crow: 'Detours'

When Sheryl Crow released her debut album in 1993, she truly broke the mould for female rockers. She sold more than seven million copies of Tuesday Night Music Club, bagging a fistful of Grammys in the process, without flaunting her cleavage or resorting to Courtney Love-style feminist rants. Crow's schtick was all about decent, well-crafted country-rock songs with choruses as wide as the eye could see. But, 15 years down the line, in an age when female popstars are ten-a-penny, where does Crow fit into the musical mix? Stefani and Pink have successfully straddled the pop-rock canon, Lily and Kate are rocking it for the kids and Winehouse is milking the soulful-struggler market dry. Crow's slices of apple pie Americana simply won't cut it anymore.

Hence Detours, which finds Crow getting all political, environmental and emotional on us, peeling back the every-woman exterior to reveal the sensitive and fiery soul underneath. Crow's sixth studio album is her most diverse - lyrically and musically – and, at the same time, her most frustrating. Her ability to snag a killer lyric on an angular hook is present, but so is her habit of spoiling perfectly decent tracks with plodding intros and crass political tub-thumping. 'God Bless This Mess', the album's opener, begins with the tale of a brother returning from war, before morphing into a diatribe against the US' response to 9/11, telling us the president "led us as a nation to a war all based on lies". Her sentiments are laudable, but the way she inserts them into the song is grating and ill-judged.

Elsewhere, on 'Gasoline', 'Shine Over Babylon' and recent single 'Love Is Free', Crow marries politics to laid-back, Jack-Johnson-style guitar stylings - though, unlike Johnson, she does at least try to imbue her songs with a bit of passion. Unfortunately, lyrics such as "hollow stones of mindless filler can lead to madman oil drillers" sound as though they were nabbed from Vietnam student rallies in the '60s, jarring against the melodic bounce of her songs. In fact, it's only on the second half of the LP - when Crow switches from the political the personal - that she truly finds her feet.

Here, Crow's recent personal troubles – in the last two years, she's been diagnosed with breast cancer and seen her relationship to Lance Armstrong dissolve - give a feisty, spiky edge to her songwriting. 'Now That You're Gone' tears away any pretence of a happy, mutually-consenting break-up with Armstrong, as Crow reveals: "You made a bed of roses, I got pricked by thorns". Meanwhile, the off-kilter, tumbling guitars of 'Make It Go Away' soundtrack Crow's honest and moving appraisal of her successful battle with cancer. These songs – as well as album closer 'Lullaby for Wyatt', dedicated to her newly adopted son - show an astute lyricist lies beneath the bluster and soapbox politics of the early tracks.

Most of all, Detours showcases an artist with the ability to grow old gracefully. Crow may have had designs on creating a political statement with this record, but her ambitions are too large and unwieldy to be placed inside three-minute pop-rock songs. However, she's saved, time and time again, by her new-found ability to transfer her emotional turmoil onto record. Detours is probably her best record since her debut, more than justifying her existence amongst the crowded generation of MySpace stars.