Spring Album Roundup: From Naughty and Nice Rap to Willie Country

ROSANNE CASH

“The Wheel”

Columbia

* * 1/2

Cash did such a brave and comprehensive job detailing the ennui of pre-divorce depression in 1990’s remarkable “Interiors” that you might have wondered what was left to cover once the papers have been signed. Ah, yes: Recovery.

But while “The Wheel” has merit as a more hopeful sequel to that stark descent, it suffers slightly from the truism that conflict usually makes for surer confessional song material than resolution.

Just when she’s teased you with a raw and insightful couplet or two, Cash seems to return to cloaking her conflicting emotions in vague “fire” and “river” and “wheel” metaphor this time, as if she hadn’t really come full circle enough to be as literal and focused about her new feelings as the old ones.

It doesn’t help that the soft-rock music is too blandly and politely arranged to convince us there’s real passion behind the therapeutic symbolism.

Still, there are moments of rare pop maturity here. The album’s best and musically starkest song, “The Truth About You,” is a gorgeous glimpse at a seasoned love in which a woman might quietly understand more about her partner’s darkness than he does. And “Fire of the Newly Alive” makes a good case for grown-up romance: “The passion of old is a children’s quick game / Now it’s the sound of the thunder and feel of the flames.” Here’s to louder, hotter weather on “Interiors III.”