Carrie Underwood. “Play On.” 19/Arista Nashville.

The musical legacy of “American Idol” can, apart from a few hiccups, be distilled down to two words: Carrie Underwood. Her later success, though, was never preordained. When she won during that show’s fourth season in 2005, it was by no means clear that Underwood’s acclaim for singing songs by other people on television was as valid as other country singers’ acclaim for singing songs by other people in honky-tonks.

The subsequent rise of Taylor Swift seemed to do Underwood no favors. Swift radiated an authentic youthful glow; by comparison, Underwood is stiffly mature — like an emissary of the Old Guard trying to fit in at the mall. Last year, at 25, she was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry, less than three years after her “Idol” win. Last year Swift released a song called “Fifteen,” about being 15.

But being the youngest old person in country music has freed Underwood from the burden of innovation. From her 2005 debut album, “Some Hearts,” to her 2007 follow-up, “Carnival Ride,” and continuing right through “Play On,” her third album, Underwood has honed a series of familiar poses — faithful girlfriend, scorned girlfriend, all-American girlfriend — each as technically well-executed as the last. She’s a great model — the best in all of country, and perhaps all of pop. Certainly that’s made many of her songs, including several on “Play On,” musically and emotionally complacent, testaments to the limitations of great structure. “Look at Me” smolders but never sizzles, and “Undo It” never fills in the gaps between bruising choruses.

On occasion Underwood has unearthed an unanticipated brash attitude, but there’s nothing here as saucy as “Last Name,” from her second album, or as vicious as “Before He Cheats,” from her debut. “Songs Like This,” the only number here with even the suggestion of an arched eyebrow, feels comparatively denuded, as if filtered through a Taylor Swift-erizer. “Cowboy Casanova” delivers, at best, a light sneer.

Worse, Underwood’s dignity is skewing toward the righteous, as heard on a pair of dim message songs: the maudlin “Temporary Home” and “Change,” which appears to have been written as the pre-emptive theme song of the next “Idol Gives Back” telethon.

But as was true on “Idol,” no amount of hackneyed songwriting can undermine Underwood’s voice, which is consistently impressive, capable of pneumatic thrusts. It enlivens plenty of moments here, even the conceptually dull “Mama’s Song,” about leaving the nest.

And like all great singers, Underwood knows when to hold back. “Someday When I Stop Loving You” is the best song here, and one of Underwood’s finest. Written by Hillary Lindsey, Steve McEwan and Gordie Sampson with slight echoes of Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough,” it’s slow and regretful and, most important, complicated.

“One foot on the bus, about half past nine/ I knew that you were leaving this time,” Underwood sings. “I thought about laying down in its path/ Thinking that you might get off for that.” But she delivers the lines knowing he won’t — it’s the wisdom that comes with age.

— Jon Caramanica, c.2009 New York Times News Service

Amerie. “In Love & War.” Def Jam

Amerie sounds downright furious on “Higher,” the angriest song on “In Love & War,” an album full of them. A martial 1960s rock-soul beat pounds and a distorted guitar jabs repeating notes as Amerie rasps accusations. “Did it make you feel good/ Treating me the way that you would?” she sings. “You took me high as you could/ Higher just to drop me off.”

Amerie had her biggest hit in 2005 with “1 Thing,” a burst of go-go percussion, funk guitar and syncopated vocals akin to Beyonce’s 2002 hit “Crazy in Love” (which had the same producer). Now on “In Love & War,” her fourth album, she has once again seized the combination of sparse, snappy, live-sounding beat and exposed voice to sing about obsessive love, before and after breakups. “I try my best but I’m a mess ’cause I can’t shake you,” she sings in “Why R U,” which has a ballad melody set to a choppy backbeat.

In the album’s sequence, “Why R U” is the fifth percussive song in a row, each from a different producer. Amerie, a writer on all the album’s songs and a producer or co-producer of half of them, clearly knew what she wanted, including lots of cowbell.

The second part of the album leans toward ballads, but not compliant ones; most are battles over trust or resentful backward glances. “The Flowers,” over minor piano chords, reminds an ex, “Deep inside I know it’s your fault that I’m not there,” and tells him how he should have behaved.

Amerie is still looking over her shoulder, for music and attitude, to Beyonce, especially the percussive chants and kiss-offs on Beyonce’s 2006 album, “B’day.” But Amerie’s raw voice, blunt lyrics and rhythmic ingenuity make “In Love & War” a designer knockoff that at times rivals the original.

— Jon Pareles, c.2009 New York Times News Service

Weezer. “Raditude.” DGC/Interscope

It’s always possible that Rivers Cuomo is joking, but the fine print on Weezer’s new album can be taken only one way. It states that he wrote one of Weezer’s songs — “Put Me Back Together” — with Tyson Ritter and Nick Wheeler of the All-American Rejects.

“Put Me Back Together” is confident and basically unironic: reliable-narrator power pop with a bit of yearning, like what the Rejects do on their own time. It’s not a parody of a style; it is the style, top to bottom.

This, even more than the appearance of the rapper Lil Wayne on the preceding track, or the album’s collaborations with high-gloss pop songwriter-producers — Kazuhiro Hara, Jermaine Dupri and Dr. Luke — shows that Cuomo has relaxed his anxious, isolated quest for the perfect rock song. He’s not only rubbing against music-makers of other stripes who might not threaten him, and doing so for comic or shock effect. But in the case of Ritter and Wheeler, he has also sought the help of those who directly inherited his audience 10 years after he started.

Weezer, with its sulky pathos, major-key metal riffs and at least one fully brilliant hook per album, has had an ambivalent relationship with mainstream pop. But here Cuomo, its singer and main songwriter, is right up against it; he’s not so invested in protecting his artist’s distance. If Weezer made films and it were the 1970s, this might be a death-of-the-auteur review.

Even weird and nasty is mostly gone from “Raditude.” Instead, Cuomo is working with hoary old rock-song themes: dance-floor lust (“The Girl Got Hot,” “I’m Your Daddy”); workin’ for the weekend (“Let It All Hang Out”); spiritual serenity (“Love Is the Answer,” with sitar, two-step Euro-pop rhythm and Indian singers); and, most jarring, a completely nonrock sentimentality and beauty, in the soft-pop/Tin Pan Alley chord changes that define “The Underdogs,” written with Hara.

But Cuomo is still usually keeping something for himself, and the album’s pleasures are figuring out exactly what that thing is. The track with Lil Wayne, for example, “I Can’t Stop Partying,” is a clunker with subtle humor: a high-roller’s club chant that amounts to an unconscious cry for help. “I’m Your Daddy,” the record’s best riff-monster, makes efficient business sense as a cross of Weezer guitar-crunch with new electro-pop. But it also bears traces of trademark Weezer-think: the earnest promise of a cheese fondue, the sickeningly corny line, “I just want to feel your fire.” Cuomo has almost gone naive, but not quite. “Raditude” sounds like a high-stakes game of chicken, and the intellectual gamesmanship becomes more satisfying than the music.

— Ben Ratliff, c.2009 New York Times News Service

Steven Curtis Chapman. “Beauty Will Rise.” Sparrow/EMI.

Near the midpoint of “Beauty Will Rise,” Steven Curtis Chapman’s stirring new album, there comes a song called “Questions,” with a premise far less innocuous than its title. “Who are you, God?” Chapman begins, with quiet purpose. “’Cause you are turning out to be so much different than I imagined.” He takes a breath. “And where are you, God?/ ’Cause I am finding life to be so much harder than I had planned.” Backed by little more than his acoustic guitar, he confesses to trepidation, but keeps going. “How could you be so good and strong,” he asks, “and make a world that could be so painful?”

Chapman, one of the leading lights of contemporary Christian music, usually traffics more in songs of glowing certainty. But he came to “Beauty Will Rise” from a place of torment: In May 2008 his 5-year-old daughter, Maria, was accidentally struck and killed in the driveway of their home by a vehicle driven by one of her older brothers. The album consists of a dozen songs made after that trauma, as Chapman grappled with his grief and, on some level, with his faith.

He never truly wavers — “Questions” arrives between “Faithful” and “Our God Is in Control” — but he does confront his confusion in ways both artful and unnerving. Some of these songs, like “February 20th” and “Just Have to Wait,” feel too personal in their specifics, too freighted with context. But the aching candor that suffuses the album, paired with Chapman’s unmistakable gift for melodic uplift, exerts a deep emotional pull. The production, leaner than usual, backs up the raw feeling behind the songs.

The most polished of those tracks, “Heaven Is the Face,” has a corollary in Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” except that Clapton, addressing his departed son, imagined what would happen “if I saw you in heaven.” Chapman, on song after song, removes that conditional “if.” By the finale, “Spring Is Coming” — which, like the title track, moves from wreckage to renewal — a pattern has firmly been established. But Chapman, repeating his assurances, sounds anything but glib.

— Nate Chinen, c.2009 New York Times News Service