Newsobserver.com Review

[greyhound]

Posted by Jack Bernhardt

With her first two albums, "Kerosene" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," Miranda Lambert came out with both barrels blazing, an angry white chick with a Texas-sized red neck. Chalk it up to breathing the same Lone Star State air that nourished the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines and pursuing the same Nashville success that snared Gretchen Peters.

With "Revolution" (Columbia), Lambert extends the formula while spewing less venom and showing more maturity. After all, she's 25 now and has learned to think before she shoots. In "Time to Get a Gun," her NRA instincts are more self-defensive than offensive. And even though she puts a bullet through her car radio in "Maintain the Pain," one gets the impression that her anger (at a guy, not a format) has been building for a while.

Lambert blends the best of Southern rock with country twang on such originals as the vengeful opener "White Liar" and "Only Prettier," a barroom ditty that celebrates walking away from a fight: "I don't have to be hateful/I can just say bless your heart." She expresses her restlessness in "Airstream Song," while "Making Plans" is her restless soul's quest for enduring love.

Lambert wrote or co-wrote 11 of 15 songs and offers spritely covers of Julie Miller's "Somewhere Trouble Don't Go" and John Prine's "That's the Way that the World Goes Round."

Lambert asserts in "Heart Like Mine" that, because of her flaws, "I ain't the kind you take home to mama." Well, "Revolution" isn't perfect, but its flaws are minor and the disc stands out as one of the spunkiest country albums of the year so far.

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