Shania Twain: Come On Over : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The first thing you notice about Shania Twain's Come On Over, once you get past her pretty pictures on the cover, is how the titles have way too many exclamation points: "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!" "Whatever You Do! Don't!" So does the music. Almost every high-gloss song opens with a bubblegum-glam cheerleader shout ("C'mon, girls!" "Cool!" "Kick it!" "Owww!"), then blasts into radio-ready rapture with offhand vocal interjections – doot-doot-doot scatting, do-si-do rapping, sexy squeaks, sarcastic Alanis Morissette asides. Twain bombards you with plastic hooks as tight as her trousers; the only reliable concessions to country tradition are all the fast fiddle-breakdown interruptions, and even those usually sound closer to classical fugues than to square dances.

On 1995's The Woman in Me, Twain and her producer-husband, Mutt Lange, stretched '90s line-dance-country until it snapped, crackled and popped (they sold 10 million copies for their efforts). On Come On Over, their songs are speedier and more concise, hopped up on the exact same sassy little chassis of synthesized sound and big-bam-boom bleacher beats that Lange pioneered on '80s records by Def Leppard and the Cars. Twain warbles about Dr. Ruth and Brad Pitt, men's shirts and short skirts, pantie lines and platonic friends, flying elephants and domestic abuse. She double-entendres out a cheeky mock-moral lesson called "If You Wanna Touch Her, Ask" that Sir Mix-a-Lot might appreciate. And in "Honey, I'm Home," she's returning from a "worse than PMS" day at the office, telling Mutt that he better be ready at the door with a cold beer and a foot massage. All that, and guitar riffs stolen from "Spirit in the Sky," "La Grange" and "In the Summertime," too. A model modern marriage or what?