Miranda/Charles

Lately it's been all Miranda Lambert and Charles Dickens. Miranda released her fourth album, questionably titled Four the Record and it's a different beast than her previous ones. Her bad girl persona was sort of pushed to its fullest extent on Revolution and only shows up occasionally on Four in the "Fastest Girl in Town" and "Mama's Broken Heart," which sounds bizarrely similar to My Chemical Romance's "Mama" from a few years back. The rest of the album is a slow, leisurely, fairly relaxing experience--the sequencing flows in a way that Revolution never quite did as the slow songs and fast songs are grouped more artfully than the previous album's fast song-slow song-fast song-slow song cycle. The production occasionally gets enjoyable experimental--"Fine Tune" has Miranda sounding muffled, almost under water, as she sings an extended car repair-as-sex metaphor, and "Easy Living" has a steady undercurrent of AM radio static throughout. The general critical response to the record seems to be that it's good but a disappointment for someone as good as Miranda and I have to disagree; most of the album was written by other songwriters and Miranda is branching out and trying something different. Her wit and intelligence are as evident in her choice of material as they are in her own songwriting.

As for the Dickens: I am in a Charles Dickens class taught by a totally brilliant and hilarious professor--(when a student asked why there were no minorities in Dickens, totally straightfaced Dr. Ledbetter said "because there were no minorities then")--and while I've been a complete disaster at keeping up with the reading I've been speeding through Our Mutual Friend the last few days and am loving it. It's crazy and experimental and employs soap opera-like pacing and totally defies my stereotypical prior knowledge of Dickens. The tertiary characters are stupendously bizarre--there is a disgusting woman named Pleasant Riderhood who has a lazy eye, runs a pawn shop, and preys ambiguously on drunk sailors. Tempestuous, obsessed, doomed Bradley Headstone (played by super hot David Morrissey in the BBC miniseries) is basically the Dickens equivalent of me in matters of romance.