Garth Brooks: "Sevens" (Capitol)

Gosh, things must be bleak in EMI corporate HQ. Three weeks to the end of the peak selling season and they are rolling out the heavy artillery. And they don't come any heavier than our Garth, a man with over 62 million sales to his platinum name. This is his seventh collection and to mark this fact the first 777,777 CDs will be marked "first edition". This is a man who does not contemplate failure. Nor does he countenance the critics whose increasingly audible sniping is still but a whisper compared to the acclaim of his fans. The self-explanatory How You Ever Gonna Know? puts us doubting scribblers in our collective box. And deservedly so. This is as finely judged a piece of merchandise as you'll hear this year, the work of a man in control who knows and understands his audience. He is not condescending or patronising. He respects the relationship he has built with them. He respects their feelings and he delivers the quality goods they have come to expect. But what does he deliver? Though country is ostensibly the genre in which he operates, this is not country music; not even bad country music. The songwriters (GB co-wrote six tracks) and the players are all big names in Nashville and Garth still wears his Stetson, but these songs cruise into territory inoffensive to all save those too mean-spirited to appreciate it. While there are some interesting twists - the role-reversal in She's Gonna Make It, the clever honky-tonk of Longneck Bottle and the appealing Trisha Yearwood duet on In Another's Eyes - the whole affair turns on whether or not you can believe him. I can't.