The Beatles once sang 'All You Need Is Love', but as any serious fan knows, love can have a disastrous effect on the quality of the music produced by an artist as well as the longevity of their career. Just look what happened when the Fab Four started getting married and ended up drifting apart. We love hearing how miserable these people are, not about how happy they are because they are in love! Fortunately, Sheryl Crow has never really had that edginess, so that Wildflower is all about how much she loves cyclist Lance Armstrong doesn't really have much of an effect.

Crow has always occupied a strange position in the world of female singer-songwriters, with neither the massive success of Alanis, and certainly not the level of respect commanded by Tori.

She has always been on the periphery, having sold a whopping 25 million albums worldwide but with still relatively few songs that everyone knows, while never producing the kind of music that gets critical acclaim. And yet she has written and co-written everything on here as well as co-producing it and playing acoustic guitar on it all. Her voice may not be particularly knock-out but it's certainly a good one that she uses well, so why does no-one seem to take her seriously?

Of course, having lyrics like: "Good is good and bad is bad, but you don't know which one you had" doesn't help, but still the song itself is a nice dramatic production, helped by orchestration arranged by Beck's dad David Campbell. Also,despite her much-professed love for Armstrong, the reality is that there is still a sense of melancholy that hangs over many of these songs, particularly Perfect Lie.

Chances Are is a very haunting song, although it does sound remarkably like Too Late from No Doubt's Return Of Saturn album, with Crow somehow turning into Gwen Stefani. Elsewhere, Crow seems to be aiming for a 70s MOR sound, rather like Carole King, which is a lot more palatable than some of her earlier rock chick songs, although there seems less chance of a chart hit here in the vein of Everyday Is A Winding Road.

However, as a album, Wildflower sits very well together and the production is good enough to paper over any cracks in terms of blandness in melody or weakness in lyrical content. Sheryl Crow probably won't win many more critical plaudits for this album and it probably won't sell as well as her earlier records, but it's still a pleasant enough and undemanding listen.