Miranda Lambert - Postcards from Texas

Sweeping fields of bluebonnets, a grazing herd of longhorns, the setting sun over a golden plain – it can all be captured on a postcard, a moment translated in cardboard and ink.

You’d think it all idyllic were it not for the glaring “Greetings from…” defiling your view. That’s so often the caveat when it comes to receiving these 4” x 6” still lifes: they’re nice, but they’ll always be someone else’s experiences, told in suffocated letters and inflated by tedious “wish you were heres.”

Miranda Lambert’s latest release, Postcards from Texas, plays out in much the same way. It’s nice, brimming with lush country sounds; yet, it fails to resonate, the album either an uninspired showcase of where the artist has been or a disjointed ode to her home state.

The project – Lambert’s tenth solo studio effort and her first with Republic Records – is meant to map a journey, charting a past full of fumbles and a future spent figuring it out. The result is something vulnerable but at an arm’s length, personal but to the point of exclusion, with some songs perhaps a little too topical to be relatable. The steel-flecked slow burner ‘Dammit Randy’ especially, with all it's theories of who it's a middle finger too, is a difficult song to commiserate with.

Even the album’s more unguarded offerings, like the sleepy ‘January Heart’ and the sputtering ‘Run’, are a little too run-of-the-mill to evoke any real empathy or understanding. Coupled with the breezy ‘Looking Back On Luckenbach’ and the misty-eyed, Parker McCollum-graced ‘Santa Fe,’ a pair of barroom waltzes down memory lane, the album is marred by disappointing lulls because of these dull attempts at self-discovery and reflection.

Of course, Postcards from Texas meets the criteria of a Lambert release: the untamable ‘No Man’s Land’ ticks the box for her usual paean to freedom; the gritty ‘Bitch On The Sauce (Just Drunk)’ joins her lengthy catalog of drinking songs; and, of course, she has to throw in an ode to reckless love, a role filled by the sweeping ‘Way Too Good At Breaking My Heart.’ While all are decent numbers, they’ve become expected, making the record predictable, as well as lackluster.

Where the album really shines is when the artist isn’t saying much of anything at all. The plucky opener, a dust-sputtering epic about an armadillo on the run, and the driving album closer, a take on David Allan Coe’s outlaw opus, ‘Living On The Run,’ are the only worthwhile sightings amongst the bluebonnets and longhorns dotting the plains.

In the end, Postcards from Texas is fine, even pleasant to behold for a moment, but not worth pinning up on the fridge.

6/10

Miranda Lambert’s 2024 project, Postcards from Texas, is available everywhere now via Vanner Records / Republic Records.

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