Nicholas Payton: “Bitches”
Bitches is a catchy enough title, I suppose, but a bit of a misnomer for Nicholas Payton’s new record. The word carries some baggage, it’s fair to say, but there’s nothing like vitriol or misogyny—or even crudity—in these fifteen songs. Payton says the album was designed to be a grown man’s post-mortem on a failed relationship, a breakup album fueled by adult feelings and real maturity. I think it succeeds brilliantly—though I should mention, I guess, that the title track, which appears as the album’s last song, does repeat the word “bitches” as a sort of chant over a handclapped blues. Payton says he’s swearing ‘em off for good this time, and it works partly because he openly admits to the cliché, partly because it’s uproariously funny, but mostly because everything that comes before it is so sensitive and tender-hearted.
But it’s a misnomer for another reason, too. Payton is a renowned jazz trumpeter with a clear, sonorous tone; you might know him from his own fine recordings, or perhaps form his stellar supporting work on Allen Toussaint’s Bright Mississippi. A jazz trumpet calling an album Bitches is destined to invite comparisons to Miles, but the Davis album this one most resembles isn’t necessarily the one you’d think: With its brittle bedroom production, Bitches is less like jazz-rock fusion, more like the kinds of albums Miles made after Tutu, when he had basically given up on jazz in favor of his own take on primitive, pop-wise R&B. Another apt comparison: Prince at his most lo-fi and homespun.
This is all to say, I guess, that Bitches is not a jazz record at all, but a slow-jamming soul record—and also that it is really weird. The tempos of these songs suggest babymaking jams, and I guess it is a kind of introspective bedroom record, but it’s the strangest but of after-hours philosophizing you’re likely to hear. Payton sings in a fine voice that’s pitched somewhere between plaintive Al Green and the more easygoing coo of, say, Maxwell. The backdrop is a lush and languid bed of muted trumpet, tinny beats and hand percussion, and washes of out-of-time synths. It’s a deliberately rickety ProTools rig with an 80’s electro tinge, and, I guess, some occasional jazz signifiers.
It’s also a very gentle and easygoing record, enough so that its weirdness almost breezes by you on first lesson; give it time, though, and its humor and panache will reveal Bitches to be a leftfield gem. These bizarre slow jams do, indeed, tell the story of a failed relationship, and their sonic trappings turn out to be oddly appropriate. The homemade feel of the album underscores how personal it is, what a true labor of love its creation was for Payton. (He calls it a “mixtape,” by the way.) And the peculiar anachronisms? They suggest, at least to me, that this is the work of a man of a certain age, and age where his basic views on love and romance probably began to form somewhere around 1983, but are still ever-evolving.
The songs are pensive and mix sexuality, spirituality, and honest human emotions—but they’re also funny! You can tell what a goofball Payton is just from some of the song titles, like “Togetherness Foreverness,” “Shades of Hue,” and “iStole Your iPhone.” The latter is the real standout for me, a riotous, funky number driven by spindly percussion and outright spite: “I stole your iPhone/ Cause you won’t leave me alone/… can’t give me a ring/’Cause you got nothing!” Meanwhile, “Freesia,” a spirited duet with Esperanza Spalding, marries a gentle thump, chilled-out Casio keyboards, and muted trumpet into what I’m tempted to call elevator music on steroids.
The funniest thing about the album, though, is how these odd numbers make the more traditional ones stand out all the more. I don’t just mean “Bitches,” which is pretty catchy, but also the Cassandra Wilson-featuring “You Take Me Places I’ve Never Been Before,” a lush and sensual love song and a true lovemaking jam. And then there’s “Give Life, Live Life, Love”—an irresistible number that moves from sweaty, soulful organ into piano improvisation. That’s right: Something resembling jazz!
But there’s more to Bitches than humor and quirks. This is an album with real heart and soul. It is thoughtful and deeply felt. Even the quirkier moments come with empathy and insight. Opener “By My Side” beings with references to birth control and Night of the Living Dead, but then Payton waxes philosophical. He says he doesn’t believe in karma, or in paying for sins of the past life, because looking backward leaves you like Lot’s wife. And that’s just the warm-up. “The Second Show (Adam’s Plea)” is kind of a New Wave take on Adam and Eve, beginning with a missing rib and moving very quickly to the Stone Age. Payton suggests that all of our problems can be traced back to Eden, and his case for it is certainly compelling.
So it’s an album called Bitches, and its cover shows a woman wearing a mask. You’d think it would be a little more mean-spirited. But it’s not, and it’s a better album for it. It’s funny, it’s warm, and it’s empathetic. It’s certainly surprising. It sounds like a lot of pain went into making it, and, after a year of record label limbo, a lot of pain surely went into releasing it. But Bitches is a joy to listen to.
Betty Wright and The Roots: “Betty Wright: The Movie”
Betty Wright begins her new album with a paean to “Old Songs,” which she also identifies as “strong songs.” The track is a tribute to the great soul tracks of yesteryear—not only does she give props to Stevie, but also to vinyl records and even 8-tracks—but it’s also an admonishment to write and record new songs, strong songs, songs that might prove timeless and enduring as the ones that paved the way. And Wright is unafraid to voice her support of what the kids are doing; she says that, over time, the beats have gotten better, but nobody writes about meaningful subject matter any more. It’s an argument that strikes close to the heart of who she is as a recording artist. Wright has been recording music since the late 1960’s. Now here she is, cutting a brand new LP of original material with The Roots as her backing band and the likes of Snoop Dog and Lil’ Wayne stopping by for assists.
Betty Wright: The Movie has a lot of strong songs on it, and also a lot of great performances. She is a great soul singer by any standard, and if the years have added some new tics and wrinkles to her voice, it’s only made it stronger. She can, and does, belt it out with joyful zeal and depth of feeling. She is unafraid to play the role of soul’s elder stateswoman, and it’s a role she plays well; she and The Roots create a sound that’s lushly retro, but, as they did with their supporting work for Booker T. Jones earlier this year, Philly’s finest enliven this music with their tight performances and crisp beats. And just to make sure you know she’s not a curmudgeon, Wright’s ode to “Old Songs” doesn’t just include namedrops of Stevie Wonder and Patti LaBelle, but also Prince and—in a sort of extended shoutout—Erykah Badu.
But try as she might to convince that she is stodgy, stodgy Ms. Wright can be. She is unafraid to take a strong moral stance, and I love her for that; this is, indeed, strongly moral music, Wright’s takes on relationships informed by her well-defined opinions of what constitutes a real man, and a real woman. (In both cases, fidelity, sensuality, and romance seem to be key.) It gives the album a center, and if it’s almost startlingly traditional in its values, it’s no less truthful because of it.
But my own preference is for songs that reveal, not advise, and some of these songs feel like relationship tips from mom. “In the Middle of the Game” recommends that a woman make her man some dinner—and if she can’t cook, to order takeout. It sounds like a decent advice column, not a particularly great song; that said, it still sounds aces thanks to The Roots’ awesome disco groove. “Look Around (Be a Man)” is also a little didactic when it bids a man to let the narrator know if he plans on cheating on her, though I like how Wright finishes the thought—that if she knows he’s going to sleep around, at least she can do some “fishin’” and “window wishin’” of her own, guilt-free.
But none of those songs are as on-the-nose and cumbersome as the cautionary tale of “Hollywould”—so spelled because it’s about a girl named Holly who would do anything, sexually, as she walks the streets at night smoking dope and pimping herself for quick cash. It seems her problems began when her mama didn’t teach her to be a lady, and when her dad sexually abused her; I have no problem with the causal relationship evidenced here, but am not wild a song that’s explanatory enough to actually use the words “sexual abuse” in describing a character’s motivations. Then again: The Roots lay down a twinkling piano/pounding drum track that’s very modern hip-hop, and it works splendidly.
Indeed, I am not at all opposed to Wright’s more modern leanings here. The old soul sounds suit her well, but then, after her game acknowledgement that the beats have only gotten better in soul music, it makes sense that she would enlist Snoop Dog to drop a good verse in one song, then have Lil’ Wayne do an even better one in “Grapes on a Vine”—a song that’s really more rock than anything else, though thankfully it’s rocking in a funky sense, not a Rebirth sense.
But the more retro brand of soul is still Wright’s wheelhouse, and there are some knockout songs here. This is soul music in the purest sense—music that actually seems like it’s good for the soul. The vibe is warm and relaxed, and the grooves are so organic that they’re allowed to stretch on for five or six minutes on most songs. ?uestlove, in particular, provides the kind of spare, crisp beats one might expect from him, and his work is foundational enough to what makes this album successful that it’s a little jarring when he’s absent on three songs.
So: “Tonight Again” is a song that Wright introduces with a caution to put the kids to bed, and sure enough, it’s a lovemaking jam that’s just exquisite in its sensuality and romance. And it’s not even the best thing here. “Whisper in the Wind” is a brilliant jam on the Philly tip, with Joss Stone on guest vocals and a great jilted love’s lyric that’s beautiful and sad. I love the closer, “You and Me, LeRoy,” a Marvin Gaye-ish tune that acknowledges external troubles but refuses to acknowledge even a stack of unpayable bills as reason for infidelity or diminished romance; when Wright says those bills have got “nothing to do with you and me,” she makes you believe her. And on top of all that, “Baby Come Back” is a glorious burst of pure Isaac Hayes/Burt Bacharach emotion, a beautifully pleading song that stands as the album’s high point.
This is good, warm, soulful music—meat and potatoes soul, I’m tempted to call it, which is by no means a sleight but rather an affirmation of this music’s goodness: The Roots lock into a groove, Wright sings her heart out, and the music just feels good. This is where passion meets craft, and nothing flashy is needed; if that passion gets the better of Wright here and there, well, it doesn’t keep the songs from sounding stellar. All things considered, the record is aces. It’s loaded with new songs—strong songs.
Film Break: This Year’s Favorites
I have seen fewer movies this year than in any previous year that I can remember. It’s not that I’ve lost interest in film, just that life and work have gotten in the way—plus, in my ever-evolving perception of what this blog is, I’ve tried to put even greater effort into writing thoughtfully and thoroughly about great new records. How shallow has my moviegoing experience been in 2011? Enough that, while many of my colleagues are likely preparing their best-of-the-year lists, I’m not even sure that I’ll be doing one this year, at least not any time soon.
But of course, I can’t resist the urge to write about a few of the pictures that have stuck with me this year. You can consider this a sort of embryonic top ten list if you like; me, I’m just viewing it as a catch-up.
There are two films from 2011 that I’d call my far-and-away favorites, and they couldn’t be more different from one another. If pressed to pick my absolute favorite, right now, I see no choice but to give it to Gore Verbinski’s Rango, the strangest and least kid-friendly kids’ movie I’ve seen in ages. From the opening sequence—ten minutes of existential paranoia, set in an aquarium—through the appearances of a hellbent rattlesnake and a spectral Clint Eastwood, it’s clear that this movie is a slave to its own stoner vision, uncompromising in its demented imagination, and what we get is a brilliantly unbroken stream of cinema philosophizing, movie in-jokes, gross-out gags, brilliant colors flashed against a backdrop of chilling darkness—and, a Johnny Depp voiceover that impresses with how little it sounds like any other character he’s played. Truth be told, I haven’t had this much fun at the movies in years.
I would not, meanwhile, say that I had “fun” at the brilliant and much-talked about Tree of Life, but I did leave two separate viewings of it with tears of joy streaked across my cheeks (metaphorically, anyway). It’s a much more ambitious and less seamless movie than Malick’s The New World, and as a result it strikes me as an even more engrossing and interesting movie. I know the Big Bang/creation/dinosaur scenes are the ones that people talk about, and they are, indeed, the scenes that make this such an explosive piece of cinema, but the heart of the movie, for me, is when it settles into the 1950’s. It’s a movie about grace, about fathers and sons, about mothers and sons, about coping with tragedy, about enduring life’s hardships, about the American dream, about original sin and innocence lost—it is a film, I think, in which we see a lot of the stuff of life. Certainly I see a lot of my life in it, and because of that, the Hubble shots and special effects are just icing on the cake.
And speaking of seeing myself—not, I should admit, in a positive light—I was deeply engrossed with Jeff Nichols’ film Take Shelter, perhaps the best actor’s showcase I’ve yet seen this year, but, more importantly, a great film about what I took at first to be a particularly modern and particularly male form of anxiety. I’ve since read some female perspectives and the movie’s resonance seems universal. Whatever the case, this is one of those truly unsettling horror stories—like There Will Be Blood—where the chills come because of how easily one sees oneself in the main character. Certainly, I can relate to having a sense of gratitude, at one’s home and family and career, that becomes so great it spills over into unease and dread at the prospect of losing those things. I am happy to report that I’ve not yet gotten to the point of building a storm shelter, however. At any rate: The movie is a masterful slow-burn, and Michael Shannon’s explosion in one pivotal scene is surely the most intense and devastating moment I’ve witnessed on the big screen this year.
A couple of other movies entertained and provoked in ways I never dreamed they might. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris has been rightly been heralded as his best in years, but it isn’t only great because of an efficient script and some well-drawn characters, but because of the way it both embraced and critiques a sort of romantic/nostalgic vision of art, and of Woody’s own career. I was moved by it and held in thrall by its sweet spirit. Meanwhile, Errol Morris proved once again, with his fine Tabloid, that a documentary does not have to be didactic or academic or stuffy in the least; this one, in particular, is sexy and scandalous, utterly bizarre and wildly entertaining.
I have already written about my fondness for The Ides of March, and remain impressed by Clooney’s willingness to go so cynical (and tell so much truth in the process, I think).
I’ll mention one more—not a movie destined to become an all-time personal favorite, I don’t think, but certainly one that impressed me a great deal more than expected. I am not particularly interested in superhero movies these days, but Captain America: The First Avenger was a real barnburner, a great time at the movies that struck me as being less similar to modern-day comic book movies and more akin to old-fashioned adventure yarns. I had no idea, going into it, that it was directed by a fellow who worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark, but of course, it all makes perfect sense.
Kate Bush: “50 Words for Snow”
There are many profound pleasures offered on the new Kate Bush album, and chief among them, perhaps, is the third song on the set, “Misty”—a song about a woman’s romantic encounter with a snowman. The song begins with the snowman being fashioned in just the same way that you or I or any child would instinctively know to fashion a snowman; it ends with wet sheets, a few twigs and dead leaves that may once have resembled eyes, and a woman’s sorrow. In between, there is rapturous and erotic love. The song is no less powerful because of the sheer strangeness, even ridiculousness, of its premise, and of how these elements fit together. In fact, it may be even more sublime because of it.
And I hasten to add that it really is a song about a woman’s affair with a snowman. The temptation, for some of us, is to read it as a metaphor for mortality—that love is fleeting and in the end we’ll all be reduced to a pile of rubbish and spare parts, remembered only, perhaps, by a lover’s lamentations. And you would be right to say that the song is suggestive of these things—but the snowman is not a symbol. The song doesn’t allow it to be. It is not a song about death, or the finite nature of our love and existence. It’s about a woman who falls in love with (and yes, okay, has sex with) a snowman, and I’m quite charmed by the idea of allowing it to rest as simply that, no further analysis needed.
It’s one of just seven songs on 50 Words for Snow, but the total running time of this disc is an hour and five minutes. Obviously, Bush is not setting out to wow us with volume here, but instead she lets these songs stretch out, their pleasures unfolding leisurely and luxuriously. None of the other songs are as fairy tale-ish as “Misty,” I don’t reckon—though there is one that’s all about the Yeti—but they are all about snow, one simple, physical object that unites each of these songs. The album is, in a sense, about snow as a symbolic, physical, historic, mythological, and sensual thing. It considers snow as an idea, and as a tangible object in a physical universe. What this means, I think, is that this is the strangest and most erotic holiday album of all time. I’m half joking—there is only one mention of Christmas here—but half not. The wintery mood here is unshakable, the unwavering focus utterly enthralling. This is a sublime album made of seven extraordinary songs, and it offers true delights of poetry and play that no one but Kate Bush could have devised.
Poetry and play—yes, those are the twin engines here; the long running time of these songs, and their fanciful approximation of snow, suggests that Bush is almost lost in her own world, letting her own imagination run away with her. “Misty” is the third movement in an opening trilogy of songs—what we might call the first act of the record, so united are they in tone—that takes up more than 35 minutes. These three songs are built on little more than Bush’s warm piano, upright bass, and light drum and guitar work. “Lake Tahoe” has some operatic accompaniment, which suggests how regal this is, but for all of the strangeness of this record, it does not ever seem affected or insular the way this kind of art-pop so frequently does. A better indicator of the album’s pleasures is the opener, “Snowflake,” a song about birth and existence that’s sun from the perspective of, yes, a falling snowflake. The music drifts and sways as if to mirror the physical motion of its titular object, and I am, again, adverse to making this into a symbol, except to say that the sonorous promise of “I’ll find you”—uttered several times, with gentle resolve—sets the tone for an album awash in intimacy and romance.
The first three songs are gentle, patient, of a piece; in the three songs that follow, however, the album explodes. You’ve probably heard the first single, “Wild Man,” albeit in an edited form; here it rambles for seven minutes, but is no less potent in its propulsive rap-groove. It is a song about the Yeti as a creature of history and of myth; Bush impresses with all the different words she knows for abominable snowman, but the song isn’t bookish so much as it is awash in wonder.
But the next song is where things really heat up. “Snowed in at Wheeler Street” is a duet with Elton John. It’s a sublimely soulful number in which the two singers play a couple of wandering souls, reunited throughout history and always at the most inopportune times—as Rome burns, as World War II rages, at 9/11—only to lose each other again. Only here, this time, they are snowed in together and determined to never become separate again. Both singers escape fully into their characters and give voice to intense sexual and romantic longing; the song is so hot, it’s a wonder it doesn’t melt everything around it.
The title track, meanwhile, is exactly what it says. Here Bush is joined by Stephen Fry, a raconteur capable of lending gravity to what might otherwise be a profoundly silly endeavor. Here he is called upon to furnish, yes, fifty words for snow; Bush counts for him, and challenges him to keep going. The snowy synonyms alternate between silly and ingenious, clever and profoundly poetic. It’s a celebration of words, of rhythm, and of snow. I imagine some will write it off as silly or indulgent, but the beat—a dance beat, really—make it much more than a novelty.
Then the album ends as quietly as it began, with a song that mentions both angels and summer; you can draw your own inferences here. However you read it, 50 Words for Snow is a true marvel, an album that teases with layers of meaning and a steady stream of ideas but never allows for easy summary. It is evocative, but elusive, and its joys come not in pinning it down but in allowing it to dance in front of you, all of its playful poetry and ravishing romance on display. It’s an album about winter that feels uncommonly warm.
Film Break: “Tower Heist”
Silly, but not at all unpleasant.
Meshell Ndegeocello: “Weather”
Weather is a pretty perfect metaphor for Meshell Ndegeocello, a singer and songwriter whose muse has led her—never without a little turbulence—through volatile incarnations of funk, hip-hop, jazz, and folk; it’s also perfect for a sometimes-stormy album that surveys the human heart’s incorrigible bluster, and the tumult of intimacy and romance. But maybe the most surprising thing about it is how serene it is. This feels to me like the sound of Ndegeocello settling, and I don’t mean that in a bad way: She’s made a name for herself on the basis of her elusive, ever-changing relationship to genre, but here she escapes category altogether and simply slips into song itself.
Weather is her most pensive album, her most reflective, and her most melancholy. This, more than anything she’s made, strikes me as a singer/songwriter album, something driven home by the presence of Joe Henry in the producer’s chair. He’s an ace at guiding these small, intimate marvels of singing and song, and Weather seems based—as is his custom—on live performance. But there’s something strange in the air for Henry and his usual cast of collaborators; these songs are spit-polished with layers of dubs and studio effects, I can only assume as Ndegeocello’s behest. Her instincts were probably right: The slight affectations on these songs don’t cause them to close up or seem stifled, but rather they reveal how puzzling and open-ended these songs—all of them great—really are. I don’t know what went on in the studio, of course, but I do know that Weather is strange, soulful, and sublime.
Its best moments, I think, are the ones where the edges are most frayed. “Weather” is a jumble of messy humanity, humor and desire bundled together like a tangle of voices. It’s funky and folksy at the same time. “Crazy and Wild” is less a tangle than a dark undertow, stately piano doing nothing to contain the savage passion, the love that leads to the brink of madness. And “Oysters,” a piano-led ballad, is hushed in desperation and need, peppered with comedy and romance. It has my favorite line on the album: “I’ll shuck all the oysters and you can keep the peals/ I do my shucking and my jiving for free.”
It’s a moody piece of work overall, its tempos slow, but don’t take that to mean that it’s boring, or a downer—there’s simply too much beauty and soul, too much ravishing romance and quirky humor, for any of that to be true. And there are a couple of moments that qualify, I think, as pure pop songs. “Chance” bursts through the clouds like a ray of sun, an analog synthesizer giving way to a warm paean to the holy act of risk-taking. “Dirty World,” meanwhile, is a vintage Ndegeocello tune, riding atop a fat bassline and an almost disco-ready beat. Catchy though it may be, this one isn’t as sunny; the chorus ends with “kick and scream and watch it burn.”
But this, I think, is what makes the album such an odd marvel—it’s compelling because, in its own elliptical way, it suggests something of a worldview, one that is no less truthful because of its contradiction. Ndegeocello has filled these tunes with want and desire, forces she regards as equally alluring and destructive, potentially murderous yet profoundly connected to what it means to be human. There are moments of tenderness and naked emotion throughout the album, then—but I think it’s no coincidence that the record ends with her warning her lover not to take her kindness for weakness (a Soul Children cover), or that a song of abject obsession (“I think about you every day, and linger on your doorstep”) is followed by one about a love that makes things new (“I want to live as a beginner”).
Weather takes strange detours and, despite a certain sense of polish, maintains a certain messiness, primarily, I think, because the singer is so persistent in allowing a sense of mystery to preside—something that spills out of the songs into the production and even into her choice of cover material, in particular a soulful reading of Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel.” It adds up to an album that’s deadly serious about love and sex, but also charmingly ragged and funny; deeply reflective and even somber, but still warm and inviting. One the surface it sounds like Meshell Ndegeocello at her most tranquil, but it quickly reveals itself to be an album of sensual pleasure and alluring depth.
Miranda Lambert: “Four the Record”
Miranda Lambert made a name for herself with a song called “Gunpowder and Lead,” in which she voiced a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend armed to the teeth and hell-bent on having revenge on her no-account former fella’, even if it meant shooting up the whole town in the process. It’s an image that’s stuck with me pretty well, and I dare say I’m not alone; my wife turns on mainstream country radio from time to time, so I happen to know the song still gets some airplay. But an image so potent, a persona so provocative, is tough to live down; imagine if Tom Waits decided he didn’t want to give voice to barflys and deadbeats any more, or if Kanye West chose to drop the ego and quit wearing designer fashions. I certainly didn’t envy Lambert in her position of following up a bona fide blockbuster, something she handled well enough on the solid, though at times rather tedious, Revolution.
The thing about Revolution was that it sort of pumped up Lambert’s Crazy Ex persona to eleven, something that made it almost seem like a shtick, something it most certainly never was on that earlier, breakthrough album. On Crazy Ex, the persona felt like a real person. There was rage, yes, sometimes almost cartoonish in its exaggeration, but it was always grounded in heartache. That album had real feelings, and real wisdom; it was angry but also intimate, humorous, and human. On Revolution, some of that nuance was lost. Thankfully, Four the Record—despite its punning title and fiery album art—finds Lambert shaking herself free from the constraints of that persona, revealing that there is a lot more depth to her on-record character than we might have though, and a lot more versatility to her own songwriting and record-making abilities than she is perhaps given credit for.
What you’ll notice right off the bat is that this is very much a songwriter’s showcase, but not necessarily for Lambert; she writes or co-writes a few of the fourteen tracks here, but outsources more than ever, receiving some fine cuts from her Pistol Annies bandmates, her husband Blake Shelton, and ace writers like Allison Moorer and Brandi Carlile. She continues to revel in both her own good taste in cover songs and, more specifically, her Welch/Rawlings infatuation, here doing a lovely reading of “Look at Miss Ohio.”
Her farming out so much of the songwriting is not a sign of laziness, or that releasing Four the Record just a couple months after the Pistol Annies LP has somehow stretched her too thin. I think it was a deliberate move to shift the focus from the lyrics—which are uniformly fine, but not congealed into a singular persona the way they have been in the past—onto the music. And sure enough, Lambert proves over these fourteen songs that she is capable of great, varied work not by rejecting the tropes of Nashville, but simply by doing them much better than anyone else does them.
There is nothing here that doesn’t qualify, closely enough, as a country song—but within that category? She opens with a lilting ballad (“All Kinds of Kinds”) and then grinds her way into a cantankerous electric blues, complete with her voice filtered through distortion that sounds almost like Autotune (“Fine Tune”). She absolutely nails a swaying honky-tonk number (“Same Old You”), and soars with arena-ready, contemporary country (“Nobody’s Fool”). She goes old-timey on the amiable “Easy Living,” and rocks hard on the bratty outlaw anthem “Fastest Girl in Town.” She channels her heartache into a weepy country lament on “Dear Diamond,” and into an incendiary, barn-burning anthem on “Mama’s Broken Heart.” The lead single, “Baggage Claim,” had me worried at first that Lambert had lost her edge (or had it confined to the Annies album), but in the context of the album is shimmering country soul is exquisite.
The words are as emotionally and thematically rich, varied, and deep as the music itself is; here again, the plurality of authors seems to emphasize Lambert’s versatility, as these songs offer sly variations on her Crazy Ex persona while ultimately establishing this as the album where she breaks free from those constraints a bit. She does sadness here better than I’ve ever heard her do it before. In “Dear Diamond,” she sheds tears for a man who’s asked her to marry him, and confides to her diamonds the secret that she can’t bear to tell him. “Nobody’s Fool” is a barroom regret that hinges on one of those perfect little country word games: “When they ask who he is, I’ll tell them nobody/ And me, I’m nobody’s fool.”
But when she wants to, Lambert still stirs some shit. “Mama’s Broken Heart” is an incredible dust-up of a song, a post-breakup rager that masks subtle commentary; mama’s heart is broken not because her daughter is upset, but because she’s broadcasting it all over town. It’s all about appearances. “Same Old You” and “Baggage Claim” are both kiss-offs that work effectively without feeling as much like extensions of “Gunpowder and Lead,” while “All Kinds of Kinds” slyly stirs trouble of another sort; suffice to say that its tale of a cross-dressing politician and his pill-popping lady friend is pretty far removed from modern country’s usual Red State sentimentality.
It’s a really well-crafted and rich record, so much so that its execution becomes more impressive with each listen, but that matters most is that it’s a ton of fun. Lambert’s largely stuck to the country music rulebook, but proven that she’s can simultaneously play by her own rules, and do this music better, looser, funnier, more tender and angry and human than anyone else is doing it right now, and Four the Record is an exhilarating and wildly entertaining experience because of it.
