miranda lambert

yay

i've been really, really feeling the first single from miranda lambert's girl group (!) pistol annies recently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOKtbJfNLFk&ob=av2e

it's a slow burner but the lyrics are so great, and when miranda's voice comes in like paint stripper...yesssss!

Yeah, I heard that song last night and really liked it. Enough to click over to iTunes to purchase it right away. But then I balked when I saw it was $11.99 for barely half an hour of music. Really I know Miranda is getting popular, but no reason to price the entire album at hit single $1.29 pricing.

A friend sent this a couple of weeks ago; I may like it more than "Baggage Claim."

oh the whole album is out now? awesome. learned by chance that a whole sunny sweeney album has emerged too

awesome

that Sunny Sweeney album is like 1/2 her EP from last year, but at least there's some new songs too. Haven't listened to it yet, or the Pistol Annies record, but yeah "Hell on Heels" is a lot better than "Baggage Claim"

My girlfriend is all about this. (She was still surprised when I mentioned I had a copy of Revolution around, which I did.)

that Sunny Sweeney album is like 1/2 her EP from last year, but at least there's some new songs too

yeah i've just glanced at the track listing - this is okay, i can (probably) now vote for the album in EOY lists instead of dithering over what to count a 5-track EP as

at the very least that EP was totally great

"Hell on Heels" is a pretty good song, but I'm bored with the persona.

oh this album is fantastic

how great is the song where sucking away the outer sourness of a lemon drop to reach the sweet part is a metaphor for making your mortgage payments

(and then three tracks later the one that starts "i've been thinking about setting my house on fire")

Love that one. Also there's something Hemingway-esque about the "Trailer for Rent" chorus (Miranda Lambert is really good at making being pissed-off sound euphoric). And I'm partial to the sweet pandering of "Boys From The South" because I'm partial to boys from the South.

and then three tracks later the one that starts "i've been thinking about setting my house on fire")

― the-dream in the witch house (difficult listening hour), Saturday, September 10, 2011 10:19 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

"housewife's prayer"!!! i am obsessed with that one. i've listened to it a million times.

she's so controlled on stuff like trailer for rent: easing into the punch line, giving it just enough exasperation to be a lol.

other things on this album: the one about being glad your dead parents aren't around to watch you and your siblings fight over their possessions; the one about getting married because you're pregnant ("we didn't take no honeymoon / with what we got ourselves into / a quick i do / then back home again"); the line "i'm a third-generation bartender".

i like that "boys from the south" is the longest song on the album, like oh i'm poor and unhappily married and addicted to pills but here's a subject we should take our time on

haha

it's so long because Miranda lists every Southern state, so lazy and empty but I love it

"Beige" is really striking, because the lyric feels true and heartbreaking but the song itself is so reductive in its acceptance of conservative worldviews--this is country music so that's not a knock, it's a great situational rendering, but it just doesn't feel right coming so soon after the riotous amoral gold-diggin' of "Hell on Heels." I guess my only knock on this album is its sequencing. "Family Feud" is great but I don't like it as a closer. But I guess Miranda has never been a great sequencer (tho Crazy Ex-GF was pretty good in that regard)

"Baggage Claim" made me think Enough Already, Miranda, but I adore this album. Maybe it's the shared vocals, or maybe it's because the tough ass persona is still there, but you have to listen harder for it.

the album's so attentive to money stuff that "beige" comes across as being about the economic-necessity angle of the sad marriage rather than the should-have-waited angle: that is, the sadness in the song isn't because people are tsking about her getting pregnant before marrying this guy, it's because she's marrying this guy at all. she's so distant from him the chorus line is "daddy's pride and joy / is marrying some boy". of course there's another way out of the situation but it doesn't come up here, which i guess is conservative but as you say these are conservative characters.

revolution had sequencing problems yeah, and it was way too long; so is the new one, by the way (review stream). one of the other things i love about this one is it's thirty minutes.

maybe it's because the tough ass persona is still there, but you have to listen harder for it

it's just so much more shaded and contextualized and detailed and funny, which is hilarious considering it's on an album by PISTOL ANNIES called HELL ON HEELS

"Beige" is such an instant classic. What I would do to hear Dolly sing it.

yeah the tough-ass persona is so great here because it's treated as such, and it sounds fun and funny, whereas in her solo work it has to come across as Authentic and Real because Real Country people only care about Authentic Music. Even though I find something like "I put a bullet in my radio" to be hilarious, it isn't presented as such while something like "ol' what's-his-name I met in a bar" is taking such evident glee in playing a part. But of course I've heard "Baggage Claim" on the radio a bunch, and "Hell on Heels" not once.

really hate the title "Four The Record" btw, yeesh. I hope it follows Revolution's path of underwhelming lead single to secret bangers. DLH, anything as good as Revolution's stretch of two-minute songs? She should do more two-minute songs.

oh man "Beige" is totally a Dolly song

there's a great song on four the record called "mama's broken heart" about her mom calling her up to lecture her about how she's been behaving post-breakup ("word got around to the barflies and the baptists / my mama's phone started ringin off the hook") and there are some other good ones too but nah i didn't think there was anything "me and your cigarettes"-level. it also has way fewer songs with a miranda writing credit than any of her other albums; i think maybe she was concentrating on the pistol annies record? where she co-wrote everything.

Lop off the first and last tracks on that Pistol Annies and it's my record of the year. Honestly, though, I'm a little more impressed by Ashley Monroe on there, not to take anything away from the other two, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the success of this album means Ashley's next one actually gets released.

she sort of looks and sounds a little too much like Lee Ann Womack for me, but her writing is great

Yeah, Monroe and Presley have more to gain from the help.

Checking songs out via youtube and I'm impressed.

Housewife's Prayer is stunning.

"Lemon Drop" and "Trailer For Rent" are my favorites.

Listened to this for the first time over the weekend. Very nice.

I kinda like Ashley Monroe's Satisfied as well. I absolutely love "Hank's Cadillac", and I like her slightly different take on Chamber's "Pony". Kasey sounds a bit too precious when she sings it, but Ashley gives it a slightly sassy feel that really works.

I saw Ashley sing "Has Anybody Ever Told You" on the Ten Out of Tenn tour in 2009. Absolute showstopper. Blew the other 9 off the stage.

last stretch of posts = v good reading

in "housewife's prayer", what's the washing machine a reference to in the second verse? it feels really sinister, especially connected to "i've been thinking about going off the deep end". if the first verse is about arson, what the second verse brings to mind is murder, and she'd need the washing machine to wash away the evidence.

i didn't realise a solo lambert album was also on the way, like others i wasn't really grabbed by the last one, but hell on heels is pretty special imo.

Yeah I just saw that today and was surprised to see it so soon after the Pistol Annies album.

wow lex, I hadn't thought about it that way. To me it sounds like something about hands being faded, due to not having a washing machine, but your reading is certainly more intriguing

also that housewife trick of putting babby on top of washing machine to calm it down? I dunno

My review: http://thequietus.com/articles/07029-pistol-annies-hell-on-heels-review

What exactly does she say after "All I need is a washing machine because..." - something about hands.

She then circles around to all her pills (and alcohol - self destructive) and her sexual frustration. A murder fantasy seems out of place in the middle. Seems like she'd be much more likely to kill herself.

Oh - and nice review!

I knew someone would call me out for my purposely contracting the time b/w Tupelo and Wilco but whatever. Toby Keith >>> Wilco

eh Uncle Tupelo & Toby Keith are up to very different things & you're just buying into the dumb media narrative that UT were "country" & thus that TK is a reasonable comparison. UT were trying to sound like Neil Young circa 1969 with a midwestern leftist lyrical sensibility: would it be clarifying to compare NY with TK unfavorably for the relative lack of clarity in his narratives?

to my ears UT sounds more like Comes a Time-era Neil Young if Young should enter this conversation at all.

you must be listening to the wrong UT album (yeah yeah maybe you're thinking "all of them"). maaaaybe the acoustic record has that sound but the guitars on Anodyne, particularly on Farrar's songs, rage, whereas Comes A Time, no matter how much I like it, is a dinner party album.

Tweedy was mostly a dog in UT, I'll give you that (also think a Wilco / TK comparison misses the point, but I guess you're writing to your audience)

Love the Pistol Annies album.

Maybe that's why the tunes dependent on the aural equivalent of the woman parts in Judd Apatow films are the weakest, the worst of which is 'Takin' Pills', an infrequent example of striking poses instead of commenting on them.

Exactly. Well done, Alfred. "Takin' Pills" is the only one I don't care for, and you pretty much nailed why.

Surprised no mention of "Beige," though, which I think is the album's best tune.