Mainstream country continues to thrive as pop Auto-Tunes its way to a younger
demographic, hip-hop ripples with regime change and rock retreats outright. Yet
2011 proved a lean year for truly great albums, as punctuated by "Four the
... moreRecord," our lone Music Row winner, despite arriving late in the year and
risking self-competition in the heady form of Miranda Lambert's parallel trio
project, Pistol Annies, which pulled votes on
its own. On her own, Lambert continues to balance her signature hell-raising,
empowered rockers with increasingly nuanced ballads; never a traditionalist, the
Texas singer-songwriter and her producers continue to lean further into
atmospheric rock and alternative accents while smartly augmenting her own superb
originals with equally involving songs from other writers, here including Gillian Welch.
