Shania Twain loves exclamation points. Her entire career has been one, and she works them into her song titles whenever she gets the chance. Like most Shania songs, the new "I’m Gonna Getcha Good!" doesn’t merely justify an exclamation point — it demands one. It sounds like a celebration, from the salacious opening guitar twitch to the flirty chorus. As usual, Shania comes out swinging: "Don’t wantcha for the weekend/Don’t wantcha for a night/I’m only interested if I can have you for life." She’s gonna getcha all right — if not with her girl-next-door beauty and cowgirl-tough singing voice, then with the song’s expertly crafted pop hooks.

"I’m Gonna Getcha Good!" is the first single from the lavishly produced Up! (Mercury), the first Shania album in five years and her fourth overall. Up! has a lot to live up to: its predecessor, Come On Over (Mercury), has sold an astonishing 19 million copies, good for sixth place all-time. It’s sold more copies than any other album released in the ’90s, and it’s the best-selling disc ever by a female solo artist. It also has a total of six exclamation points in its song titles. Up! has 10 plus the one in the album title, and it’s gonna need every single one of ’em to match sales numbers like that.

For Shania, the runaway success of Come On Over was years in the making. She grew up poor in rural Timmins, Ontario, and had to raise her three younger siblings after her parents died in a car crash. A stint as a showgirl at a nearby resort led her to Nashville, where she got signed as a country singer in the early ’90s. Her first album, Shania Twain (Mercury), attracted the attention of legendary heavy-metal producer Mutt Lange (AC/DC, Def Leppard), who had recently decided to start working with country acts. Shania and Mutt started writing songs together, and they eventually got married.

The first album they made together, The Woman in Me (Mercury), sold more than 12 million copies and made a superstar out of Shania. It marked her triumphant debut as a songwriter on disc, and Mutt’s bombastic production beat Garth Brooks, the reigning king of country-pop crossover, at his own game. By the time Come On Over passed Garth’s No Fences (Capitol) as the best-selling country album ever, no one was surprised. Least of all Mutt — after all, he’d already sold 19 million albums with AC/DC’s Back in Black (Atlantic).

The biggest hit on Come On Over was "You’re Still the One," a tender love song with a grand flourish of a chorus informed by two decades of classic Mutt power ballads. Shania elevated herself to Britney/Madonna status with the hilarious girl-power manifestos "Man! I Feel like a Woman!" and "That Don’t Impress Me Much," both of which had more in common with ’80s corporate rock than with country. Fellow country divas Dixie Chicks, Faith Hill, and LeAnn Rimes began to follow Shania’s lead, but her combination of rock exuberance and kitsch-pop hooks remained the most fun to be had on country radio.

Come On Over was still riding high on the charts when Shania and Mutt decided to move to Switzerland and have a baby. After their son, Eja, was born last year, they didn’t waste any time getting started on Up! They traveled all over Europe and the Caribbean while they were writing the album, and they recorded the tracks in Dublin, Milan, and the Bahamas. It’s the first time they’ve made an album outside Nashville, but not really: they assembled an entire Nashville studio band in the Bahamas, including many of the same players who worked on the last two Shania albums.

The transcontinental pop party that produced Up! would seem to suggest how little Shania and Mutt care about their country credibility — especially compared with their archrivals Dixie Chicks, who recorded their new album in Austin with a little help from their friends and family and called it Home (Sony). But the marketing campaign behind Up! goes to great lengths to prove otherwise. In an unprecedented move, Shania and Mutt are releasing two versions of the album simultaneously, as part of a double-disc set that sells for the price of a single disc. The mainstream pop version of the album, the red disc, is the first part of the set both in North America and abroad. Then there’s the green disc, which is more roots-oriented and is being sold only in North America. Perhaps most intriguing is the third, import-only version of the album: it’s blue, and Shania describes it in a note included in the packaging of the North American CD as "more rhythmic with an Eastern influence."

Shania and Mutt experimented with this unusual practice on Come On Over, which was remixed into a "less country" version and released with a different running order for the international market. Two years after the original North American album came out, the international version was also released here. The experiment was a success: to date, the disc has sold almost as many copies abroad as it has in the US, for a grand total of 34 million overall. Shania and Mutt don’t even like to call the alternate versions of Up! remixes, since they recorded so many different parts for each one. Whatever you want to call it, the green disc sends a few different messages to Shania’s original audience, North American country radio and its listeners. It’s either a thank you for being there at the beginning, an apology for selling out, or both.

"Up!" is the first exclamation point on the album, and it’s the perfect subject for a red-versus-green litmus test. A pretty Byrds guitar chime kicks off both versions of the song, which finds Shania in a typical everygirl pickle: her skin is acting weird, she just wants to disappear, there’s no way but up from here. Another Shania trademark, the choir of Mutts backing her up on the song’s ultra-chirpy chorus, also appears on both versions. The big difference is in the backing tracks. A discofied synth line propels the verses on the red version; on the green version, there’s enough fiddle, banjo, and steel guitar to get a line dance going. Shania’s vocal inflections and harmonies are heavily country-influenced on both, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone who liked the American version of Come On Over would be disappointed by either.

That said, I know which one I’ll be reaching for when I want to listen to Up!, and that’s the corporate-rockin’, synth-poppin’ red version. At 19 tracks and 73 minutes long, it’s chock full of the gutsy vocals and silly digressions we’ve come to expect from Shania. As for Mutt, the longer the album plays, the better his universal pop genius sounds. At this point, the only question left for him is how long Def Leppard will have to bide their time working with Mutt clone Marti Frederiksen (who also produces Faith Hill) before Shania hires them as her backing band. Or at least invites them on tour with her, especially since she recently signed on with long-time Lep management team Q Prime.

On the disc’s first great Def Leppard moment, "Nah!", Shania and Mutt trade rhymes over a tightly ricocheting drumbeat: "That’s it! (That’s all!) We had fun! (We had a ball!)" Then they get swept away by a sunny country-rock chorus, and the guileless charm of their partnership becomes something more profound. The same thing happens on "Thank You Baby! (For Making Someday Come So Soon)," where they rescue each other from a hapless cycle of dating over a vintage Tears for Fears groove. Mutt lets his infectious Lep squeals do the exclaiming on the silly arena-romp "Waiter! Bring Me Water!", but Shania isn’t amused — in fact, she’s about to douse him (uh, her date) for checking out some other chick.

The action slows in only a couple of spots, usually when Shania and Mutt try too hard to go global. Shania’s pop feminism takes an uncharacteristically spiritual turn on "Juanita," and the track settles into a dark tropical groove that sounds flat next to the vivid soundscapes on the rest of the disc. On "C’est la Vie," they let the light back in with a chorus that’s a little too close for comfort to Abba’s "Dancing Queen," but Shania is such a natural for Eurodisco that it’s hard to complain. As for country, it’s more of a reference point than a vocation for Shania these days. Still, the disc’s most explicit cowgirl beat, "I Ain’t Goin’ Down," has a touching single-mother testimony to match.

Up! is a logical follow-up to Come On Over, and a step forward in many respects. Its only commercial liability is the lack of an obvious successor to "You’re Still the One." The album’s low ballad-to-rocker ratio (3 out of 19) is part of what makes it such an exciting ride, but at the end Shania finally gives in and does a wedding song, "When You Kiss Me." By then, contemporary pop’s most excitable couple have traded all their exclamation points for sweet nothings and a thick layer of Spanish guitar. Like all great entertainers, they know the value of understatement.