The New York Times

[1stRanFan]

By: JON CARAMANICA
Enough with the outsider narratives: even when Miranda Lambert was a ferocious Nashville upstart obsessed with firearms and comeuppance, she wasn’t so strange. She was a clear inheritor of the legacies of generations of tough female singers: Loretta Lynn, Jessi Colter, firebrand-era Dixie Chicks, even Reba McEntire in her saucy early years.

Furthermore, as the hits on Ms. Lambert’s last album “Revolution” showed, she was more than capable of succeeding in Nashville’s restrictive framework without deviating too far from her own.

Those songs, “White Liar” and “The House That Built Me,” finally made Ms. Lambert a country superstar and earned her best female vocalist plaudits at the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music awards. So on “Four the Record,” her fourth album, she has plenty of newfound capital to spend.

She does so in audacious and perplexing fashion. This is the least direct album of Ms. Lambert’s career, at times a carnival of left-field country styles and approaches. Unlike her side project Pistol Annies, released this year, which was devoted to reviving and energizing classic country modes, the twists on “Four the Record” feel almost experimental.

Early on the album comes “Fine Tune,” a song that is literally fuzzy, with Ms. Lambert sounding as if she were singing through a piece of steel wool. Later is the jaunty “Easy Living,” which has a steady stream of radio chatter in the background, troubling Ms. Lambert’s easy story of a happy relationship.

Still, that song is the best example on this album of what Ms. Lambert can do with her voice alone, even with a straightforward lyric. She sings in a bendy chirp, sometimes shooting rapid-fire syllables, and sometimes mulling over a word with a couple of different notes before letting it go. Rarely does she sound offhand.

And normally, she’s emphatic in the right places, but this album also includes some of Ms. Lambert’s least committed singing, like on “Fastest Girl in Town” and “Safe.” On “Dear Diamond,” about a wife-to-be keeping a secret from her future husband, the most affecting vocals are the backgrounds, sung with stern compassion by Patty Loveless.

Alarmingly, these are some of the songs that Ms. Lambert was involved in writing, which typically has been one of her strong suits. But the tracks she contributed here are among the weakest, especially given how unusual some of the material she chose from other writers is, like “All Kinds of Kinds,” a humorous plea for tolerance that features a cross-dressing congressman and circus freaks.

Ms. Lambert also finally uses this album to enter the world of alt-country, a scene she’s long been falsely tagged as representing. The bruising, swinging “Mama’s Broken Heart” recalls the 1930s and Dwight Yoakam. She covers Gillian Welch’s “Look at Miss Ohio,” but strips out its wry side. And Allison Moorer wrote a song for her, “Oklahoma Sky,” about Ms. Lambert’s rediscovering herself in the home state of her husband, the country star Blake Shelton; and Ms. Lambert owns it, with her most vulnerable singing on the album.

Ms. Lambert and Mr. Shelton sing together on “Better in the Long Run,” the most pop-minded song here, recalling the duets of Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and Ms. Lambert doesn’t sound even a bit out of place. But all that pretending to be small elsewhere on the album? Perhaps they’re hints of a true outsider in the making.

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Bev Lambert - Ran Fans President

Miranda, are you packing heat? "Can't tell you," Lambert twangs. "That's why it's called a concealed weapon. How about you just be nice?"