After an acrimonious legal battle with his former manager and an ill-advised move toward adult-contemporary pop threatened to sink his career, Clint Black has righted himself on the delightful No Time To Kill. This outing returns Black to the modern Texas honky- tonk that made 1989's Killin' Time one of the best debut albums of that decade. Stuart Duncan's fiddle and Paul Franklin's pedal steel are pushed forward in the mix; a skipping swing beat is injected and Black sounds like he's back in the Houston saloons where he started his career, singing about heartaches and stubborn pride with one of the state's strongest, most flexible tenor voices. --Geoffrey Himes
