Between Raising Hell and Amazing Grace (Warner, 2007)

Big & Rich return with their third album of country music without prejudice, and the album feels stuck between good and bad. The album is divided into two parts, a call back to the Side A/Side B days of yore. The first half starts with a short clip and launches in the B&R's bid for the 2007 wedding market, the single "Lost in This Moment." Then things take a semi-spiritual side with the title track, "Faster Than Angels Fly," "Eternity" (featuring R&B artist John Legend) and "When the Devil Gets the Best of Me" all slower tracks that showcase Big & Rich's unique vocal harmonies.

With televangelist verve Big Kenny kicks off the second half leading into "Radio" which kicks up the tempo of the disc, but does so with an amalgam of bad '80s rock clichés, which also show up again in "Loud." "High Five" continues the same pattern until running into the inane "Please Man." The most interesting track is, oddly, a pure hillbilly version of AC/DC's "You Shook All Night Long." The disc proves that songwriters and producers don't always keep the best stuff from themselves.