Miranda Lambert: New Album Wildcard

When the Highwomen rightly raise awareness for the lack of female voices on country radio, they’re clearly not talking about Miranda Lambert. All six of her previous studio albums have entered the charts at number one, Lambert’s Pistol Annies side project trio (where she shares the spotlight with Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe), has also found radio and popular acceptance and she plays large venues bringing along other women as openers.



Still, she is only nominally a country artist these days, as pop and country merge she has been on the forefront, something reinforced by the diverse Wildcard. Nobody would confuse Lambert with classic acts of the genre like Loretta Lynne or Lee Ann Womack, let alone Dolly or Emmylou. But with a charming twangy voice and the occasional injection of banjo, pedal steel or mandolin, she nimbly struts a tightrope between pop, rock, folk and Americana with enough hooks to be commercially viable, especially to millions of other women. That’s mostly due to lyrics which promote a resilient female perspective of strength and sass combined with just enough introspection and witty wordplay to make it real.



Lambert’s 2016 The Weight of These Wings was an expansive double platter, 24 track set that seemed intent on displaying a more serious, introspective side of the Texas born party girl. In contrast she opens this follow-up with “White Trash” where she proudly and humorously owns what is often a derogatory term with “I can play high class every day/ but some things never change” against modified 80s new wave beats.



As the 14 tunes unwind we hear about how backwoods country Lambert remains in songs like the hard rocking “Locomotive” (“Now I’m sweet tea sippin’/ On the front porch sittin’/ While my hubby fries chicken”), the somewhat boastful “Pretty Bitchin’” (“Well, I’m a pretty hot mess/ But hell, I guess/ I’m pretty sure it’s a family tradition”) and especially the rowdy, clever and ultra-catchy pop “It All Comes Out In the Wash” (“You take the sin, and the men, and you throw ‘em all in/ And you put that sucker on spin”) likely to become a concert sing-along favorite.

The rock touches are smart and perfectly in keeping with Lambert’s ability to bridge high-end glammy and front-porch real: “Way Too Pretty for Prison” cleverly opens with a noisy guitar scrum that evokes Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak,” then turns into Lambert and guest Maren Morris’ hilarious spin on the classic feminist outlaw murder fantasy: She’s got an asshole husband, but rather than deep-six the guy themselves, they hire out the job because they might end up in jail, where the “lunch trays don’t come with chardonnay.” Elsewhere, the speedy Seventies-tinged “Locomotive” signifies its rawness when Lambert sings, “I ain’t no Napa Valley/New York City seems OK.” On the softer side there’s “Track Record,” a gorgeous ode to her errant romantic ways that recalls the War on Drugs’ shimmering indie-rock guitar pastorals.



Lambert’s Texas honky-tonk brio and charisma-bomb sense of humor goose every song, especially when the musical fruit hangs a little lower — like on “White Trash,” a hick-hop ode to gated-community crashing (“Dog hair on the Restoration Hardware/Who says you can’t have nice things?”), and the country-rock invite “Pretty Bitchin’,” which rhymes with “help yourself to the Tito’s in the pretty kitchen.”



Moments like these remind us that adventurous music doesn’t need to be as self-serious as many of today’s pop stars seem to think. But that in no way means Lambert is soft-peddling her ambition; see “Holy Water,” a gospel-tinged country-blues anthem about religious and political corruption as a literal stain on the land: “You can’t skip a stone where the river’s all but gone,” she warns. Her expansive vision of down-home America makes it a place worth fighting for.