MIRANDA LAMBERT - Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Review

The bulk of what's been written about Miranda Lambert's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend leading up to its hotly anticipated release has focused on how the tone of her marketing has changed of late, attempting to position her as country music's resident bad girl. That impulse to label is a fairly easy one to understand, as it perpetuates a straightforward image for Lambert, an artist of impossibly broad talent whose path to success (from a third-place finish on Nashville Star to a co-starring role in the failed Piper Perabo vehicle Slap Her…She's French to a platinum-selling debut album, 2005's Kerosene, that sold big with negligible support from country radio) hasn't made a whole of sense....full text Country music has always been synonymous with honesty and truth. It’s the genre’s biggest draw and sometimes its biggest drawback. The music has forever been a place where you can go to get intimate, believable stories about the most essential functions and facts of human existence—love, work, family, death. With arguably more grace and consistency than any other song form, country speaks deeply and plainly to the concerns that occupy our minds and the feelings that seize our hearts....full text Crisp-voiced Texan Miranda Lambert's breakout single, 2005's ''Kerosene,'' gave her a homicidal rep that she embraces on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, her second CD. In ''Gunpowder & Lead,'' she waits with a shotgun for her abusive man; the title track has her toting a pistol to confront her ex's new flame. But fear not, gun-control advocates: The nonviolent side of small-town yearnings is here too (love the lazy back-roads hum of ''Desperation''). And even if her fiery temper's not for everyone, she never stoops to teardrops-on-my-guitar banalities....full text