New albums: Kelly Clarkson; Big Sean; James McMurtry

Kelly Clarkson

Piece by Piece

(RCA ***)

nolead ends Despite her big sales and many awards, it's still not certain what sort of artist Kelly Clarkson is. She cowrites and heartily sings immensely memorable pop, country, indie rock, and electro-dance - all with ease, power, and big sales - yet, there's a sense of confusion as each Clarkson album rolls out. Every disc yields a half-dozen hits that her audience consumes happily, but you sense her often-discussed displeasure with categorization.

Clarkson has threatened/promised to make a full C&W or Broadway album, but Piece by Piece is neither. Instead, it's another fabulous, sleek, mixed bag of coolly passionate pop-soul ("Run, Run, Run," with John Legend), icy but personally empowered anthems ("Invincible," cowritten with Sia) with empty, angsty fuzz guitar, gloriously swooping orchestration, and ripples of homey lap-steel twang.

"You're a different kind of fun," she sings on the glossy "Heartbeat Song," nu-ABBA-ish dance pop that sounds as if her glorious soprano was put through Auto-Tune, even if it wasn't. All of Piece is absolutely great, but maybe Clarkson needs a truly different brand of fun so she can come back to pop refreshed and sharper. - A.D. Amorosi

nolead begins Big Sean
nolead ends nolead begins Dark Sky Paradise
nolead ends nolead begins (GOOD Music/Def Jam ***)

nolead ends Rapper Big Sean has been the standby waiting to stand out, consistently pumping out hits, but somehow lacking the zealous audience response seen with other artists. He's below-the- radar famous. As he raps on the first track of his third studio album, Dark Sky Paradise, "I guess it took 10 years for me to be an overnight success."

The album is very honest, as in "Win Some, Lose Some": "I just turned my momma hoopty into a new Caddy/ People thinking I'm rich, I wish they knew that I've been signed for four years, and I've been just able to do that." He touches on sexual-assault charges brought against him (and subsequently dropped) in 2011, and the track ends with an audio clip of his father's giving him advice: "Life is a feeling process."

Throughout the album, Sean flexes his lyrical muscles with clever metaphors, wordplay, and one-liners, as in "Blessings" ("When your stars align, you do like the solar system and plan it out") or "Play No Games" ("I'm all ears, in other words I'm here [or is it "hear"?] for ya." Paradise's heavy beat is reminiscent of Childish Gambino's "Yes," and his flow is a ferocious flood of catharsis.

The album has a dark side, but Sean manages not to be morose, ending with an upbeat "Outro." In Paradise, the darkness is a source of strength, inspiration, and allure.

- Sofiya Ballin

nolead begins James McMurtry
nolead ends nolead begins Complicated Game
nolead ends nolead begins (Complicated Game ***1/2)

nolead ends "Honey, don't you be yelling at me when I'm cleaning my gun," James McMurtry warns in the grabbing opener of the opening song of his first album in six years. It's not the prelude to some bloody domestic melodrama. Rather, "Copper Canteen" is quintessential McMurtry, a well-etched portrait of ordinary heartland folks trying to hang on and hang together in the face of forces they can't always control.

So it goes throughout Complicated Game, which finds the Texas troubadour at the top of his. In "South Dakota," a war vet returns home only to be told, "You won't get nothin' here but broke and older." Even when someone gets out, like the singer of "Long Island Sound," the trappings of success seem hollow. Probably the most upbeat assessment comes in the epic "Carlisle's Haul": "At the end of the rope there's a little more rope - most times."

McMurtry also writes about affairs of the heart, and the album is more acoustic-based than usual. But as he puts it in "How'm I Gonna Find You Now," "I always keep it real."

- Nick Cristiano

Brandi Carlile, The Firewatcher's Daughter; Noel Gallagher, Chasing Yesterday; Staple Singers, Freedom Highway CompleteEndText