"white girls -- they're pretty funny," Mick Jagger sang on "Some Girls." And if you need to ask who's the whitest of them all, who should strut right up and sit her tuchus down on that whitest-white-girl-of-all-time throne, just listen to Sheryl Crow's eponymous follow-up to her wildly successful 1993 debut "Tuesday Night Music Club."

Those sassy, instant-gravy dollops of organ sound, those earthy-yet-urbane references to John Coltrane, those impeccable handclaps dropped into place with the precision of Martha Stewart positioning a candied violet on top of a frosted cake -- they're all the mark of one of the whitest singers in the biz. Whitest of all, though, is the voice, maybe not bad as voices go, but so completely taken with its own backup-singer-makes-good funkiness (self-important in its own laid-back way) that it cancels itself out. It's a full-bodied voice with a mysteriously negative calorie count. If Olestra had a sound, it would be "Sheryl Crow."

You almost couldn't look at a jukebox in 1994 without having the megahit "All I Wanna Do" start pouring out of it like a curse. If people noticed that the song ripped off the major riff of Stealer's Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You," most of them looked the other way, and it was easy to see why, given the song's swervy, gin-and-tonic bounce. It's hard to know how the song would have played out if it hadn't been played to death on the radio; as it was, though, the hippie-chick joie de vivre of "All I Wanna Do" made it instantly likable on the first listen and absolutely detestable by the 4,653rd.

Crow digs for more gold on her new LP; she's churned out songs with lots of killer good-timey riffs, but she's got some messages for the world this time, too. The result is an album that manages to sound big and overblown and homespun at the same time -- the effect is like trying to tone down big hair by wearing comfy flannel PJs. Crow tries so hard both as a performer and songwriter that she occasionally comes close to sucking you in -- sometimes her glossy grooves almost make you want to shake your booty. But after one or two songs, it's hard not to catch on to the slick surface of her down-homeyness.

In putting together these songs, Crow seems to have used every trick in the book, from fuzz bass to plaintive steel guitar, from wah-wah pedals to "Sgt. Pepper's"-style psychedelia and occasional Traffic-style guitar diddling. After a while, her rock 'n' roll textbook approach becomes tiresome: who cares how many different styles she and her band try their collective hand at? Even guest stints by Attractions drummer Pete Thomas (on "Redemption Day") and singer/keyboardist Neil Finn (on "Everyday Is a Winding Road") don't add much weight or depth.

Crow also wants to make sure she sends you off with a deep thought or two, maybe something like, "The fire rages in the streets/and swallows everything it meets/it's just an image often seen/on television" (from "Redemption Day"), or, "Watch our children while they kill each other/With a gun they brought at Wal-Mart" (from "Love Is a Good Thing"). (That last line caused Wal-Mart to pull the album from its shelves. If the store's record buyers find lyrics like that a threat, they should get out more.) Crow's dual messages of "boogie down" and "listen up" bump against each other awkwardly, and Crow's too self-absorbed and facile to make either one sing out. Hers is a tinseltown kind of consciousness. She's trying so hard to be lofty, she doesn't realize how ludicrous some of her lyrics are: "Come leaders, come you men of great/Let us hear you pontificate." Men of great? Is that anything like the sound of lousy?

But even when Crow's ostensibly singing her heart out, she doesn't sound as if she cares all that much. Her voice swoops and cracks as if on cue -- she sounds so calculating that even her burnished timbre ends up meaning nothing. On the warm, squishy acoustic ballad "Home," she sings, "I'd like to see the Riviera and slow dance underneath the stars/I'd like to watch the sun come up/in a stranger's arms." It's not so much the sensitive-barefoot-gal triteness of her ideas that does her in, it's her bloodless delivery. "I woke this morning to the sound of breaking hearts/Mine is full of questions and it's tearing yours apart," she sings, her voice butterfly-soft and stone- dead.

This is Crow singing from the depths of her soul, or what passes for it, doing her damnedest to move us. She's killing us softly with her song -- and it can't end a moment too soon.