Send "Miranda Lambert " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 One of the more priceless exchanges on NPR this year came during a conversation between Texas singer-songwriter Miranda Lambert and reporter Renee Montagne, on October 27:Montagne, haltingly: “I take it that your parents occasionally would open your home to women who were trying to escape abusive marriages.” Lambert: “Yeah, we took in women that were victims of domestic abuse. They lived with us for two years on and off. I had to share my room with either a daughter or a mother and daughter who needed a place to stay. The problem is, half of the women take your advice, and use your help and get out, and half of them can’t leave and always go back.” Montagne, solemnly: “Is there one song that we could play that would reflect that?” Lambert: “Well, ‘Gunpowder & Lead’...” See? It’s a topical song! “Gunpowder”, you’ll remember, was the raucous song that opened Lambert’s second major-label album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend; she loaded the shotgun, lit a cigarette, and awaited the return of her good-for-nothing abusive man. It was all very Kill Bill, and Lambert sounded like she couldn’t wait to pull the trigger. In the first song on Four the Record, her terribly titled new album, Lambert merely rips up a geometry test. If she’d paid more attention in math class, she might’ve noticed that this is actually her fifth album—a self-titled debut is long out of print—and she could have used an awful liquor pun instead. Maybe next time. For as long as she’s been on the national radar, Lambert has courted an image as a gun-toting whiskey-drinking wild woman, and the nation has been happy to oblige. It makes for a good angle, even if just as many of Lambert’s hits and greatest songs—“Famous in a Small Town”, “The House That Built Me”, “What About Georgia”—have celebrated staying home, staying put, NOT going wild and crazy. The woman contains multitudes, but playing the brash outlaw is still important to her. Unfortunately, the only brash outlaw song on Four, “Fastest Girl in Town”, is pretty rote stuff—Lambert drinks, smokes, drives too fast, visits town naked, and sings the word “ain’t” to an uninspired rock melody. It’s hard to sustain a career with brash outlawness; just ask Eminem. Sooner or later it just winds up sounding forced....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| If her first three albums were all about using genre archetypes and a whip-smart songwriting voice to develop an artistic persona of nearly unprecedented depth and complexity, Miranda Lambert's fourth album, Four the Record, is all about risk calculus. Though she's never adhered to the strict guidelines that Music Row tends to impose on its artists (and on its female artists, in particular), Lambert has never flaunted convention as willfully or as recklessly as she does on her latest album. There's always something to be said for artists who are willing to experiment and push boundaries, but Four the Record is the first album of Lambert's career wherein her reach exceeds her grasp. More problematically, however, is that it's also the first album of her career that doesn't really have the same depth of narrative and character development that's made her the most vital country artist in decades. Tellingly, Four the Record is the album that Lambert has had the least hand in writing, and the album suffers for its lack of her distinctive voice. Though songs like opener "All Kinds of Kinds" and Brandi Carlile's "Same Old You" are fine enough on their own merits, they lack the scope Lambert has brought to her original compositions. Kacey Musgraves's "Mama's Broken Heart" makes for a fun listen, but none of its lines have any trace of the wit that Lambert showed on similar bad-girl vamps like "Only Prettier" or "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," so it plays out as though she's covering a song that's blatantly derivative of her own, superior work. Perhaps more troubling than an issue of diminished returns is that several of the songs Lambert did co-write are nowhere near as sharp as her previous material. Lead single "Baggage Claim" takes a novel spin on the construct of emotional baggage and stretches it far beyond any semblance of internal logic, resulting in a hodgepodge of mixed metaphors, while "Fastest Girl in Town," a co-write with Angaleena Presley, squanders a couple of genuinely great lines on a one-dimensional character sketch that pales in comparison to the songs Lambert, Presley, and Ashley Monroe wrote for their fantastic Pistol Annies side project just a few short months back. It's not that the songs are bad per se, it's that Lambert, even as part of a side project, has set a standard for herself that she struggles to live up to on Four the Record. The obligatory collaborations with new hubby Blake Shelton fare the worst and are the two weakest tracks Lambert has recorded to date. Monroe co-wrote "Better in the Long Run" with Gordie Sampson and Lady Antebellum's Charles Kelley, and the song has far more in common with the completely faceless pap on Lady Antebellum's Own the Night than with anything else Monroe has done. Shelton's overwrought performance is symptomatic of the problems with his Red River Blue, and Lambert sounds outright bored by lyrics like "I can't unlove you just because you say it's better in the long run." In promoting the album, Lambert has professed a personal connection to "Over You," a song she co-wrote with Shelton, inspired by the tragic death of his older brother when he was 14. Lambert has never been one to shy from difficult topics, but the sentiment behind the song is undermined by some truly awful rhymes ("Mid-February/Shouldn't be so scary/It was only December/I still remember") and a chorus that doesn't actually match the meter of its simplistic lines ("You went away/How dare you/I miss you/They say I'll be okay/But I'm not going to/Ever get over you") to the rhythm of the song....full text |
| Tasteofcountry |
| One thought comes to mind after listening to Miranda Lambert‘s new ‘Four the Record’ album: The 27-year-old now has two of the century’s top country albums. ‘Four the Record’ is an ambitious project that comes on the back of a career defining album from the Texas born country singer. ‘Revolution’ earned Lambert so much hardware that she likely had to build a new foundation underneath her mantel. We don’t want to jinx her, but she may want to keep a contractor’s number handy. Even in the face of songs like ‘The House That Built Me,’ this new project is Lambert’s most personal to date. It’s not easy to bare one’s soul when you know millions of people are watching and waiting to judge you, but Lambert does it over and over again on songs like ‘Over You,’ ‘Dear Diamond’ and ‘Oklahoma Sky.’ Not all of these songs are ripped from the pages of her personal life, but each feels as if she’s worn them to exhaustion. What she’s giving us is unfiltered, stripped-down emotion. She takes chances, beginning with the second cut, ‘Fine Tune.’ The filter Lambert sings through gives the song an indie rock feel (Liz Phair, anyone?), and it really takes several listens to hear the beauty in her lyrics. Nothing else compares to this song sonically, but others — like ‘Nobody’s Fool’ — also ride along the rim of what is standard country fare. At times, listening to ‘Four the Record’ feels dangerous. Fourteen songs is often too many for an album, but ‘Four the Record’ needs each of them to push listeners to the edge before bringing them back to what’s expected from Lambert. ‘Mama’s Broken Heart’ is right down Lambert’s violent Main St., and to a lesser extent so is ‘Fastest Girl in Town.’ One misfire is ‘Easy Living.’ It’s a sweet and simple lyric sung over a swinging mid-tempo back beat, but the stereo distortion and transmitter-like distractions cause one to wonder if his radio is broken. ‘Better in the Long Run’ is also a lull. Blake Shelton isn’t as skilled at pushing limits, so this duet comes off feeling rather ordinary....full text |
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