BILLY RAY CYRUS”It Won’t Be the Last”...

BILLY RAY CYRUS

“It Won’t Be the Last”

Mercury

* 1/2

Rarely has a singer come so far to attain mediocrity as Billy Ray Cyrus does on his second album.

Thrust into the spotlight by the fluke success of “Achy Breaky Heart,” the Tennessean looked for a while like the Anti-Garth--a performer so relentlessly bad and so graceless under fire that he threatened to undo all the progress country music had made in the last few years.

His follow-up certainly doesn’t grapple with any of the issues raised by this experience (unless you read “Throwin’ Stones” as a response to his detractors rather than to a heartbreaking girlfriend), and it doesn’t suggest any radical strategy for reform. It has the same producers, pretty much the same band, the same rock-edged approach to country.

But the material, much of which Cyrus wrote or co-wrote, is a touch better than the songs on his dreadful debut, and his singing is a little less strained. In short, it’s probably the best you could expect from a journeyman, bar-band-style singer with no artistic vision or vocal distinction.

Cyrus is obviously in way over his head, and it’s reached the point where you actually tend to start feeling for him. The closing “When I’m Gone,” a warm ballad in Elvis’ soft-strum “Blue Hawaii” mode (complete with the Jordanaires on backing vocals), isn’t exactly a revelation, but in this context it’s at least a relief. Still, the album title seems unduly optimistic.