Lambert delivers feisty set

November 21, 2009|Stuart Munro, Globe Correspondent

WORCESTER - She’s three albums into her career, but Miranda Lambert’s only local visits to date have been brief, over-before-it-starts sets at the front end of an arena package tour. So her show Thursday night in the upscale confines of Worcester’s Hanover Theatre provided the first opportunity for a good look at the rising country singer.

Lambert made the most of it, offering a little better than 90 minutes of her brand of rock ’n’ roll country, which translated easily to the stage - even if her performance leaned to the rock side of that mix. She showed herself as feisty and full of heart and spitfire sass on stage as she is on record, whether wailing and flailing in front of a mike-stand constructed out of a double-barrel shotgun (Miranda is a girl who likes her guns) or sitting down on the edge of the stage to sing the heartbreak ballad “More Like Her’’ to the front row.

The borders of her country were marked by the throwback sound of “Dry Town’’ and the lope of her first hit, “Me and Charlie Talkin’,’’ on the one hand, and the barely country power ballad sweep of “Dead Flowers’’ and the marvelously punked-up “That’s the Way That the World Goes ’Round,’’ on the other. But they were delineated even more by the covers she chose: winking role-reversal via a smoking tear through the Faces’ ode to rock ’n’ roll excess, “Stay With Me,’’ and the fist-pumping crunch of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll’’ (which, curiously, garnered the largest crowd response of the evening).

Her only nod in a classic country direction was an apparently unscripted one: Accompanied by a band member on acoustic guitar, she did a mesmerizing take on “Crazy’’ as part of what appeared to be an unscheduled encore. In the end, though, what keeps Miranda Lambert country is the powerful, thick-as-glue Texas twang of her singing voice, which shone through whether she was belting out the modern country of “Famous in a Small Town’’ or the arena rock of “Maintain the Pain.’’

Adam Hood opened the proceedings with a set of sturdy outlaw-styled country tunes.