Album Of The Week: Miranda Lambert Four The Record

This is, admittedly, a bit of a curveball. Miranda Lambert is very much a product of pop-country's starmaking machinery -- a pretty blonde woman singing sparkling, glossily produced songs in an industry full of people who match that exact same description. She got her break when she came in third on the reality show Nashville Star, and the one time I saw her live was when she opened for Toby Keith at a New Jersey arena a few years ago. For plenty of the people reading this paragraph, all those things will immediately mark out Lambert as some form of The Enemy. But one thing that many stripes of music fans persistently fail to acknowledge is that Nashville's assembly line is extremely good at what it does. If you turn on country radio at any time, you're going to hear the work of complete professionals, songs immaculately written and beautifully performed, with plainspoken story-song lyrics that people relate to because, at their best, they're absolutely and unapologetically moving, the same way a nakedly manipulative Hollywood film can be moving. And for the past five years or so, Miranda Lambert has been, quite possibly, the best thing to come out of that particular business.