Now screening on a double bill with some zombie movie…

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[6.83]

Will Adams: Miranda Lambert won’t just lure your ship to her island, she’ll throw you overboard, repurpose your vessel as a cigarette boat, and speed off laughing. I suspect this is as commanding as Lana Del Rey thinks she sounds before she contradicts and prostrates herself at the feet of her lover. Miranda, on the other hand, is always in charge — in her narrative, in her song. That “come on!” is infectious, and the bait and switch she pulls would be cruel were she not in the right; she tells you in the second verse that she has a reputation, she told you she was crazy, and there’s no use in keeping up with her. Kudos to Miranda for making country something that I will now actively seek out.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I can hear her savor the phrase “I got the cigarettes” — we really gotta quit, Lambert — and spit out “tattoo and a smile” like a bitter obligation. In between is the softened way she sticks the phrase “haul some ass.” A maelstrom of Hlubek-style wheedle swallows up the college-rock guitar line; it takes a while to pick itself up, but it comes back an acid casualty. As ever for her, “crazy” is a red herring; sniff around it too much and she’s over the next eight hills.
[7]

Josh Langhoff: She’s a bad girl, but I don’t care.
[3]

Michaela Drapes: Everyone’s playing at being bad here. Miranda lacks the crazy fire I like from my small-town bad girls; the totally competent session musicians are a little too buttoned up to really let ‘er rip. This is all a bit stale for my tastes; unless this is some kind of meta-statement about the fallacious joy that comes from living fast and hard? Come to think of it, I wouldn’t rule that out.
[6]

Katherine St Asaph: Miranda sneers and exults like Barbara Keith while fulfilling every critic’s bullet-packing, adventure-having, classic-rocking fantasy — the video may be girl-powered, but it’s not Danica Patrick she’s singing to. “Fastest Girl in Town” is smart, yes, and fast enough, but there’s a whiff of pandering on her trail.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: It wasn’t god that made honk-tonk angels, but some of them were born that way. I’m totes in favor of Miranda Lambert’s efforts to chronicle the glories of being chronically slutty (“Guilty in Here,” “Boys from the South,” “Hell on Heels,”) but “Fastest Girl in Town” just isn’t that wild. “I’ve got a hankering for getting into something,” Lambert sings, but she sounds bored, not horny. I mean, you can’t deny her way with phrasing, but any excitement here lies only in the way the backing codes as rock ‘n’ roll. There’s no tension and I don’t believe her.
[5]

Pete Baran: You know what? It’s just a competent country rock song.
[6]

Anthony Easton: Lambert is the master of first person narratives. She also has the clipped edges of sentences, and the rangy quality of anger and self-fulfilling prophecy that seems iconic and all-American. I like how it combines booze, sex, and guns; I think that it’s important that one vice leads to the other — smoking leads to “starting fires” of the more intimate sense, and the lack of control in driving or in sex, or in reputation, is depicted in poker metaphors. These are recursive, linguistic games about how to line up pleasure, how pleasure becomes a set of worked through tropes. The whole thing speeds like NASCAR and turns out to have the exact opposite result of Springsteen, but the same metaphors — this might be more Springsteen than Eric Church’s hagiography. 
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Her best single since “Gunpowder and Lead,” and one of her most versatile; I’ve loved this as the first track on my running playlist, at stun volume while cleaning the kitchen and while I’m failing terribly at whatever racing game I’ve been playing. The guitars don’t quite make it to overdrive by the end of the song, but Miranda tears at the vowels as if they were steak. Playing to her well-established and slightly frayed on-record persona? Yes. Astoundingly good at it? Hell yes.
[10]

Alfred Soto: “Gunpowder and Lead” is land rich and arable enough to sprout several albums’ worth of fruit, and this third generation spawn boasts unhinged guitar and a Lambert vocal performance confident and self-mocking enough to obviate any charges that she’s playing to stereotypes instead of with them.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: I haven’t heard anything this much like the ’74 Stones in a long, long time. The gleeful amorality; the charm that names itself without, contra all laws of recursion, drawing its bite; the total control of her own swagger translating into total control of the audience. The guitar player’s listened closely to Mick Taylor, too.
[7]

Alex Ostroff: Miranda tears into the lines with relish, and this is probably the most fun I’ve had with one of her singles since “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” but the touches of archetype that worked so well with the Pistol Annies verge on caricature here. It’s still a blast, but compared to something like “Gunpowder & Lead” or “Kerosene,” this is elegantly written but doesn’t necessarily reveal much.
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