When Miranda Lambert introduced her upcoming Las Vegas residency, she was following within the footsteps of kindred artists who advanced from icons into manufacturers: suppose Cher, Shania Twain, Whitney Houston’s hologram. It’s not off-script for a girl who, 20-plus years into her profession, is approaching the standing of one other genre-transcending icon-turned-industry, Dolly Parton, whose CV Lambert’s has usually mirrored: songwriter, performer, celebrity-coupledom survivor, chart-topping duet accomplice, all-star vocal trio co-leader, inclusive membership jam dabbler. Lambert’s breadth is on full show on Palomino, a free idea album in regards to the American street, accomplished throughout two years spent largely off-tour. It’s a scattershot travelogue, idealized and hopeful, shiny with giddy pleasures, welled tears, and a few of her best-ever songwriting.
In some ways Palomino springs straight from The Marfa Tapes, Lambert’s profitable 2021 writers spherical with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, filled with deeply-felt storytelling and boozy punchlines. Palomino reimagines a few of Marfa’s highlights and re-engages Randall, a former Emmylou Harris sideman, as co-producer and co-writer alongside Lambert’s longtime MVPs, Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby. Not like the dusky Nebraska sound and campfire harmonies of The Marfa Tapes, Palomino isn’t tonally coherent. However neither was 2016’s The Weight of These Wings, Lambert’s most formidable show up to now, and that report’s unleashed spirit returns on Palomino, demonstrating the tensile power of Lambert’s craft in all kinds of settings.
It peels out with “Actin’ Up,” a contemporary Music Row rhyme showcase channeling Elvis’ Solar classes with the spirit of an Eminem freestyle, stuttering consonants and spitting random signifiers: Billy Bob’s Texas, Tiger Woods, “Mony Mony.” After some road-trip scene-setting (“Scenes”), Lambert settles in for the trip with some Marfa Tapes remakes. “In His Arms” was already near-perfect in its fireside-demo iteration; right here its acoustic guitar body will get wrapped in a lovelorn country-western dreamscape, with watercolor-washes of electrical guitar and metal. Benefiting extra from a fuller association is “Geraldene,” a feisty dress-down that echoes the situation and title of Parton’s love-triangle signature, albeit with extra of a “Fist Metropolis” perspective: “You are trailer park fairly,” Lambert sings, “however you’re by no means gonna be Jolene.”
“Music Metropolis Queen,” a cool strut a couple of riverboat with one other nod to nation’s excessive priestess, options outstanding visitor vocals by the B-52’s, a Southern band whose camp sensibility at all times felt Parton-esque. “Tina by no means fairly had a Hollywood physique/However she makes a rattling good look-alike Dolly,” sasses Lambert, Schneider answering “woo, Dolly!” in his greatest “Rock Lobster” bray. It’s an impressed gesture on a goofy track that, like a lot of the album—see “Nation Cash”’s Southern-rock swag and the honky-tonk tackle Mick Jagger’s juke-jointed 1993 solo monitor “Wandering Spirit”—hums with the enjoyment of grasp musicians screwing round, reveling in course of and one another’s firm. It feels extra about having enjoyable than about song-crafting for the ages.
