Beneath the Velvet Sun

When Mullins hits his mark (as he often does on Beneath the Velvet Sun), the results constitute Southern-flavored pop at its finest. Just don't expect your world to be rocked by lyrical insights or musical innovation.

Beneath the Velvet Sun is the uneven work of a talented artist who doesn't seem to trust the idiosyncratic approach that brought him to national attention enough to really let himself go. You can hardly blame him for trying to play it safe, given his one-hit wonder status, but the album's very bow to commercialism may keep it from being the hit it might have been.

Sun's production is disappointingly safe, walking down a very predictable, somewhat dated road, instead of machete-chopping a path of its own.... [Its] most dazzling moments are its most straightforward -- the ones where Mullins strips away his affectations and flashes naked emotion.