Miranda Lambert: Revolution

Sarah Palin in spurs

Like politics, country music is all about persona, and this 25-year-old Texan comports herself as a straight-talking, pistol-packing, hell-raising maverick. “I ain’t the kind you take home to mama,” she sings on her new record, and—unless your mother used to govern Alaska—that may be true. On “Time To Get A Gun,” Lambert describes herself as the kind of girl who’d buy a firearm today if she hadn’t spent her money drinking last night—and yet, for all the bluster, she may be most effective as a balladeer.

Although she contemplated blasting her boyfriend with a shotgun on her extraordinary 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the real killers were “Desperation” and “More Like Her,” a pair of slow jams. This time, we get “Dead Flowers” and “Me And Your Cigarettes,” both of which drop Lambert’s guard. On songs like these, she resists the temptation to play the spurned frontierswoman out for revenge. She’s a little wounded, a little scared, a little less of a caricature and a little more human.