  cover art  Lady Antebellum  Own the Night  (Capitol; US: 13
Sep 2011; UK: 3 Oct 2011)  In appearance, the Grammy-winning,
millions-selling country-pop trio Lady Antebellum can seem
perennially fun-loving, even goofy. Think of the video for last
year’s hit “Our Kind of Love”, with them joking around on
playground equipment, or past songs like “Lookin’ for a Good
Time”. They’ve built their success—and they have been hugely
successful, more so with each album—on a good-natured,
“universal” appeal. Their biggest hit so far, though, was the
moody drunk-dialing ballad “Need You Now”, the title track of
their second album. Their third album, Own the Night, takes its
cues from that song more than their others, perhaps wisely. Its
mission seems to be to expand upon the melancholy demeanor of
that song; to take the waiting-room soft-country ballad and make
it gloomier; to make sadness stylish, like on the album cover,
where they’re at a beach dressed in black, Hillary Scott’s dress
billowing like a harbinger of death