per se on Lynne's sixth album - there's more soul and jazz than steel guitar, with no trace of the usual Nashville slick country-radio fare. What you will find is a genuine evocation of country, which is to say, the rural landscape and the associations it triggers. "Where I'm From" is Lynne's fond, vernacular-filled tribute to her home state of Alabama, and like much of I Am, it moves on a lazy river of sound, seducing you after repeated listenings rather than bowling you over from the outset. On songs such as "Leavin'," with its slow but determined gait, and "Thought It Would Be Easier," with its insular, ruminative funk, Lynne describes her state of mind with an uncanny knack for aural metaphors as powerful as country's weeping guitars. And the way she harmonizes with herself throughout the record is nothing less than righteous.

Like MeShell Ndegeocello's masterful Bitter, Lynne's I Am is a breakup album that lingers. Her musical purview is as singular as her emotions are naked; check out the fusion of R&B and country in the mandolin-spiced "Life Is Bad" or the high-pitched keyboard whine that makes "Why Can't You Be?" wiggle ever so weirdly. With I Am Shelby Lynne, the woman Tammy Wynette once called "the best voice in country music" has made an album that lives up to that billing, and then some. (RS 834)

PARKE PUTERBAUGH