John Michael Montgomery's Kickin' It Up proves that as far as mainstream tastes go, sugar and schmaltz go hand-in-hand.

Kickin' It Up is like a bowl of over-milked Cheerios sitting on your kitchen table. To redeem the situation, you add a spoonful of sugar in hopes of producing some taste. Yet an over-milked Cheerio, with or without sugar, is still an over-milked Cheerio.

In that case, Montgomery is not only the soggiest Cheerio in music right now but also the biggest -- Kickin' It Up was the No. 1 album on the Billboard album chart last week. Following in the footsteps of fellow country clones Garth Brooks and Billy Ray Cyrus, Montgomery has found a mass audience for his backwoods twang and schmaltzy lyrics.

On Kickin' It Up, Montgomery's music falls into two styles -- soppy ballads and background music for beer commercials. Just listen to the song that kicks off the album, "Be My Baby Tonight," and try not to imagine a quickly cut commercial with Budweiser, buxom blondes with tight-fitting jeans and guys playing pool.

Then you have songs such as "Kick It Up" and "Friday at Five," where Montgomery sings about his worry-free weekends. In fact, when listening to the album, one gets the impression that Montgomery lives a pretty worry-free life. The lack of troubled lives in country music is what has appealed to so many -- unlike rap and rock, country tends to reaffirm American values while sugar coating everything in sight.

Even the ballads on the album are upbeat and happy in a mellow sort of way. There are no lost loves in songs such as "I Swear" or "Rope the Moon" -- only current lovers who Montgomery wastes no time in idolizing.

Musically, the fiddle is one of the most underused instruments in music today, and it is nice to hear its sweet sounds cushioning the ballads. But the electric and pedal steel guitars that build the foundations of the "beer songs" come off as country renditions of early '80s cheese-metal classics.

If Montgomery has done anything with the album it is to help further expand the reach of country music. It would be nice to believe that those turned onto Kickin' It Up will explore artists such as k. d. Lang and Lyle Lovett, who have expanded on their country roots over time. For now, I'll take my All-Bran over Montgomery's soggy Cheerios any day.