Rosanne Cash's third album, Somewhere in the Stars, cements her status as one of the most impressive singers to emerge in the Eighties. With husband and producer Rodney Crowell, Cash pursues a kind of minimalist country music that's lyrically fixated on emotional ambivalence, the slippery feelings diametrically opposed to the simple, direct emotions of traditional country lyrics.

What distinguishes Cash as a singer is her honesty, which musically manifests itself in a behind-the-beat slowness born of emotional caution. There is a stillness at the center of her singing–part patience, part paralysis – from which she weighs both sides of a romantic crisis. This contemplative style best lends itself to ballads, and the new album's killer is "Looking for a Corner," an exquisitely pained little drama about the self-hatred that arises from ambiguous feelings about family ties, fame, marriage and adulthood. Anyone who's ever felt too big for his or her parents' house will appreciate lines like "Trouble when you're searchin' and you ain't so very young You don't fit in to table talk but you can't hold back your tongue."

But Cash is no Rita Coolidge, singing soggy sob stories. She doesn't miss a pissed-off nuance in "I Look for Love," John Hiatt's survey of specimens under the garish neon of a singles bar, and she cheerfully throws water on starry-eyed romanticism in Hiatt's "It Hasn't Happened Yet." She also reveals the comic potential of her interpretive matter-of-factness on "Third Rate Romance," which has never been performed better.

But for all its pleasures, Somewhere in the Stars doesn't quite hold together. "That's How I Got to Memphis" is a throwaway cut with an off-key cameo by Johnny Cash. On the title track. Rosanne's slowness turns to snooziness. And the cuts that push her toward rock (and the crossover market) tend to come off as cold and brittle. Rosanne Cash is caught in the middle between country and rock – will what's good for her singing be good for her career? Well, she's gotten this far by being true to herself, and the less she worries about catering to one audience or another, the better off she'll be. (RS 374)

DON SHEWEY