Faith Hill
Cry (Warner Bros. Records * 1/2)

Time was, female country singers didn't have to sell out to sell.

Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette — all cut classic songs, and all sold millions.

Those days, however, are long gone. As a result, artists eager to reach the commercial heights of Shania Twain or Faith Hill try to please everyone by dipping into various styles, and then they produce music that isn't very good, no matter what you want to call it.

The most glaring example, at least lately, is Hill herself: Her previous CD, 1999's Breathe, sold 8 million copies. Now comes Cry, a horrible collection of songs that often have as little character as a box of Pop Tarts.

Cry, to be blunt, is a mess, a record that veers from style to style like a drunk trying to weave his way home at 3 a.m. One minute Hill is doing a big rock-power ballad; the next she's moving into light-funk/modern R&B; the next she's taking on a middle-of-the-road, end-of-love weeper. And so on.

The problem with this approach — well, the first problem — is that nothing sticks; in trying to master various styles, Hill seems adrift, like she can't find a safe harbor for her songs.

Then again, who could? Musically and lyrically, everything here is a cliche, from the '80s rock-power ballad solos grafted on here and there to the urban grooves — which never groove hard enough to make us feel like Hill has any real affinity for the music — to the lyrical content.

The title track, for example, boasts this couplet: "If your love could be caged, honey, I would hold the key/And conceal it underneath the pile of lies you handed me."

Deep, huh?

And it goes on like that, verse after chorus after verse, for 14 songs, most of which all but evaporate into thin air. The emptiness of this music, and the sheer push-every-button cynicism of it, is at times astounding.

And the real tragedy here is, Hill does not have a bad voice — it has a nice, mature quality to it, indicating that if she ever decides to make a record with some real depth and soul, she could pull it off. It would be, at the very least, interesting to see what she could do with a crop of songs by the likes of Buddy and Julie Miller, or Bruce or Charlie Robison. Not that we're ever likely to find out — as Sam the Sham once told me, when you're riding that gravy train with the biscuit wheels, it's awfully hard to step off.