Blown Away

The title track of Underwood's darkest album is a genuine piece of Southern Gothic dressed as arena country. It opens with an ominous, almost trip-hop pulse — programmed percussion, a low synth churn, banjo figures cutting in like debris — and builds a storm you can hear approaching. The production, by Mark Bright, is deliberately unlike anything else on country radio in 2012: menacing, cinematic, its dynamics modeled on the weather it describes. Underwood sings it with a chilling calm in the verses, describing a drunk, abusive father passed out in his chair while a tornado bears down, then locks the cellar door and leaves him to it. Her belt on the chorus isn't triumphant, it's vengeful — a howl that matches the wind. The lyric refuses moral tidiness: "there's not enough rain in Oklahoma to wash the sins out of that house," and the daughter's silence is presented as justice, not tragedy. Culturally it belongs to the lineage of murder-ballad country ("Goodbye Earl," "Independence Day") but stripped of the winking humor. It's a song for late-night highway driving through open country when the sky goes green, or for anyone who has ever fantasized about a clean break from a home that never deserved protecting.