Keith Urban Love, Pain & The Whole Crazy Thing CD

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.
Personnel: Keith Urban (vocals, guitar, E-bow, bouzouki, mandolin, piano, bass guitar, percussion); Ronnie Dunn (vocals); Tom Bukovac (guitar); Rami Jaffee (keyboards); Jimmie Lee Sloas (bass guitar); Chris McHugh (drums, programming).
The fair-haired Aussie who came across the pond with guitar in hand to show Nashville how it's done, Keith Urban became a country music phenomenon in the early 2000s. Like his contemporary Brad Paisley, Urban combined songs with a broad-based appeal and fiery fretboard skills to gain a wide audience. LOVE, PAIN & THE WHOLE CRAZY THING finds Urban refining his approach ever further, to achieve the perfect marriage of pop, rock, and country.
Electronic-sounding beats, soaring string arrangements, and searing lead guitar mesh seamlessly with banjo, steel guitar, and mandolin throughout the album. The amalgamation of '70s/'80s widescreen pop-rock a la Elton John and Bryan Adams with contemporary country sounds surprisingly natural here. From the airborne "Shine" to the down-and-dirty "Raise the Barn" (with a guest turn from Brooks & Dunn's Ronnie Dunn), Urban never falters. Whether the reason lies chiefly in his guy-next-door persona, hook-heavy songcraft, or instrumental deftness, LOVE, PAIN has platinum written all over it.
Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing was released on November 7, 2006, just after country singer and songwriter Keith Urban entered -- of his own accord -- into treatment for alcoholism. With Urban having married actress Nicole Kidman just months before, the timing couldn't be better. After all, Urban is trying to get well at the very peak of his life -- thus far -- personally and professionally. Be Here, his last album, is, at the time of this writing, at nearly the four-million mark in sales. As fine as that disc is, this one is another giant leap for Urban as an artist. Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing is slicker than anything Urban has issued before, but that's because it's more ambitious as well. Urban is a rocking guitarist, a complete wildman on the electric six-string, and he can combine his tough, unhinged approach to playing guitar with pop songwriting and utterly brilliant production elements that layer strings, drum loops, fiddles, banjos, E-Bows, and Hammond B-3s. Add a songwriting style that touches on the classic elements of rock, country, and mainstream pop, and you have something that hasn't been heard in the country genre in this way before. That's right -- the album is further proof of his ability to stretch the genre to the breaking point by bringing in more of modern pop's elements while remaining firmly within it.
This albums feels, song by song, as if there isn't anything he can't do. Co-producing with Dan Huff, Urban wrote or co-wrote ten of the album's 13 cuts -- there's a hidden track buried in the CD-ROM portion of the disc. The production is thoroughly modern, but feels like the country equivalent of George Martin. It's positively baroque in places, and there is so much packed in that it almost feels claustrophobic, but he makes it work beautifully. No record since Neil Diamond's brilliant Beautiful Noise -- produced by the Band's Robbie Robertson -- has sounded so regal and inviting. The album's first single, "Once in a Lifetime," opens the set; it entered the Billboard chart at number 17, the highest debuting single since the chart's inception. But the shock is simply that it's not the best track on the record. Urban has packed this disc with fine writing and excellent, even defining versions of the songs he chose to cover. There are a number of rockers, including "Faster Car," with its smoking, funky bassline and layered power chords on guitars and his "ganjo" that ring above the horn section, and "I Told You So," which uses acoustic guitars, fiddles, and the ganjo to usher in some twisting, minor-key electrics. Both songs are based on tiRolling Stone (p.124) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Imagine Daryl Hall with Nashville guitar skills and an Australian's fascination with Southern culture, and you have Keith Urban....He's accomplished in ballads, unafraid to scuff up his smoothness."
Entertainment Weekly (p.79) - "Urban has a flexible tenor voice, with just a hint of rasp in it; he excels at singing ballads..." -- Grade" B-