Rascal Flatts has always been an anomaly in country music. Signed to the Disney label Lyric Street, they arrived in 2000 as essentially a trio (winning lead vocalist Gary LeVox fronted pin-up boy Joe Don Rooney on electric guitar and Jay DeMarcus on bass) that traveled and recorded with additional musicians to make up a full band. Despite their workingman backgrounds, their repertoire was so pop-oriented that hardly anyone could really call them country, and the group bristled at being dubbed Nashville's Boy Band. Yet while they were primarily marketed to teens (the young set screams their lungs out in concert), a lot of adults found their bouncy, bubbly radio tunes irresistible. And in 2006, when they released their fourth album, the quadruple-platinum Me and My Gang, they sold more than 700,000 records the first week, ending up as the best-selling artists of the year across all genres. Now comes the follow-up, and with the group sharing production credit with hit-meister Dann Huff (Keith Urban, Faith Hill), they turned out an extremely well-built album of heavily layered, grown-up pop. (The one country-ish song, "Bob that Head," about the joys of Friday night cruising in a tricked-out truck, almost amounts to a rap.) DeMarcus has said that the band took its time making the record, and it shows--everything about it telegraphs a growing maturity. Not only do Rooney and DeMarcus play on every cut (which they didn't do until Me and My Gang), but the trio has a hand in writing much of the material that doesn't come from the pens of Nashville's most reliable songsmiths (Jeffrey Steele, Neil Thrasher, Steve Robson, Hillary Lindsey, and headliner Kenny Chesney on "Take Me There"). It all goes down quite smoothly, from the sexy title track to the pain ballad "Better Now," to the (too-obvious) social commentary of "It's Not Supposed to Go Like That." As a measure of that, even actor/singer Jamie Foxx's guest appearance on the silky "She Goes All the Way" blends seamlessly with the rest of the material, much of it crafted to manipulate the emotions with power choruses, stinging electric guitar solos, and throbbing drums. But unlike the Rascals' other albums, there aren't many story songs here. And though LeVox's hangdog tenor hammers home the devastating ache of failed relationships ("Help Me Remember"), there's no standout tune like "What Hurts the Most," and not a lot of this sticks in your head after it's gone. Yes, as the title promises, it "Still Feels Good," but only for a little while. -–Alanna Nash
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