Dixie Chicks: Home : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robison are perky, earnest and can play a little, so they'll be ding-blasted if they'll jeopardize their status as the princesses of likable country pop. Home finds the chicks fluffing their feathers over a broody collection of tinged-with-melancholy numbers and a couple of song stories, such as Bruce Robison's maudlin "Travelin' Soldier" and Patty Griffin's "Top of the World." Free from lush Nashville textures, Home sounds spare and stringy, with zero bottom. But despite the down-home focus, the newly nesting Chicks haven't overcome their chief weaknesses. Bug-cute Maines' voice is inadequate on screechy novelties such as "White Trash Wedding" and plangent beauties alike -- she sounds lost under Stevie Nicks' "Landslide." They are incapable of shaping a song, teasing out tension, friction or emotional swoop; they're happy to just play it.