** Sheryl Crow

SHERYL CROW

(A&M)

"All I Wanna Do," from Sheryl Crow's 1994 Tuesday Night Music Club, with its wily, hippie-girl joie de vivre, made the album instantly likable on the first listen and absolutely detestable by the 4653rd. Crow's new, homonymous CD tries to grab some more serious territory, with lots of good-timy yet messagy songs. The result manages to sound big and overblown and homespun at the same time.

Crow tries so hard both as a performer and as a songwriter that you want to give her a fair shake: she favors big fat sassy grooves that make you shake your booty. But she wants you to have a good time really bad; how else can you explain the record's profusion of handclaps, wah-wah pedals, and dirty-rice organ lines, not to mention occasional Traffic-style guitar diddling?

She also wants to send you off with a deep thought or two to ponder -- maybe something like the now notorious "Watch our children while they kill each other/With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart" (which caused Wal-Mart to pull the album from its shelves). Dual messages of "boogie down" and "listen up" don't necessarily have to cancel each other out, but Crow's too self-conscious and facile to make either one sing out. She's like those white girls who use the adjective "funky!" so often it's obvious they don't have a clue what it means.

-- Stephanie Zacharek