Review: Miranda Lambert triumphs with daring and idiosyncratic touches

COUNTRY

Miranda Lambert, "Palomino" (RCA Nashville)

With its full-band arrangements and glossy production, the excellent new album isn't as radical as last year's "The Marfa Tapes." But it's still full of daring and idiosyncratic touches: an opener, "Actin' Up," built on a low-slung psychedelic-soul riff; a funky party song, "Music City Queen," featuring the B-52's; the gutting "That's What Makes the Jukebox Play," about an "old dive bar with the hand-drawn heart hanging lonely on the bathroom door"; a rowdy cover of Mick Jagger's "Wandering Spirit" with background vocals by gospel's McCrary Sisters.

The music is steeped in country-rock tradition — think Loretta Lynn meets Tom Petty — yet alert to the thrill of disruption.

Taken in tandem with "The Marfa Tapes" and with " Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)," Lambert's bachelorette-bait duet with Elle King that just became the first track by two women to top Billboard's Country Airplay chart since 1993 — "Palomino" posits that Lambert has reached a point where she's more or less doing whatever she wants even as she's come to a kind of fruitful understanding with the hidebound country-radio establishment that hasn't always valued her work.

MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times

POP/ROCK

"Every day I'm trying not to hate myself," the British pop crooner sings on a new single, "but lately it's not hurting like it did before." "Love Me More" is a simple but affecting ode to self-acceptance, and Smith delivers it with a breezy lightness that convincingly brings the message home. The arrangement keeps things airy and understated, so that even when a choir of backing singers enters in the middle, the effect is neither dolorous nor heavy-handed. The song, like Smith, keeps moving forward with a confident spring in its step.