Pretty nice. Has that interesting quality where even the best and most immediate songs don't have obviously enormous hooks or singalong choruses, but nearly all of the songs - across a double album no less - are enjoyable to listen to.
[Edit 11/9: After a couple more days of fairly solid listening, The Weight of These Wings merits an upgrade to 'really very good'. I reckon my 'first couple of play-throughs' reaction above was overly coloured by my expectations given Lambert's huge mainstream popularity and origins on a tv talent show, and the way that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, while listenable, didn't demand any kind of continued listening after its initial few spins. But more listening has brought home the sturdiness and high quality of these songs, and Lambert's performance of them, as well as how well sustained that is across its more than 90 minutes run time.
Whether it's the faintly Unforgettable Fire / Joshua Tree ballads-invoking airiness of opener "Runnin' Just In Case" or the matched atmosphere of other three bookends "Use My Heart", "Tin Man" and "I've Got Wheels" (although a record like Wrecking Ball is a better reference point for those three) and the various other mid-tempoish numbers throughout ("Getaway Driver" and "Tomboy" maybe stand out the most, but impressively, none of them are entirely generic), the numerous enjoyable variations on up-tempo countryish roots, rock and pop (the electric guitar punctuation that shows up on cuts like "Highway Vagabond" and "Vice" is especially welcome, and is the pop-inflected upsurge - taking its cues more from All That You Can't Leave Behind, which, by the way, seems to have become a bit of a minor touchstone for me somewhere along the way there - of "Keeper of the Flame"), or one of the relatively few straight-ahead country moments (most notably, "To Learn Her"), this is good stuff through and through.]
[Edit 11/9: After a couple more days of fairly solid listening, The Weight of These Wings merits an upgrade to 'really very good'. I reckon my 'first couple of play-throughs' reaction above was overly coloured by my expectations given Lambert's huge mainstream popularity and origins on a tv talent show, and the way that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, while listenable, didn't demand any kind of continued listening after its initial few spins. But more listening has brought home the sturdiness and high quality of these songs, and Lambert's performance of them, as well as how well sustained that is across its more than 90 minutes run time.
Whether it's the faintly Unforgettable Fire / Joshua Tree ballads-invoking airiness of opener "Runnin' Just In Case" or the matched atmosphere of other three bookends "Use My Heart", "Tin Man" and "I've Got Wheels" (although a record like Wrecking Ball is a better reference point for those three) and the various other mid-tempoish numbers throughout ("Getaway Driver" and "Tomboy" maybe stand out the most, but impressively, none of them are entirely generic), the numerous enjoyable variations on up-tempo countryish roots, rock and pop (the electric guitar punctuation that shows up on cuts like "Highway Vagabond" and "Vice" is especially welcome, and is the pop-inflected upsurge - taking its cues more from All That You Can't Leave Behind, which, by the way, seems to have become a bit of a minor touchstone for me somewhere along the way there - of "Keeper of the Flame"), or one of the relatively few straight-ahead country moments (most notably, "To Learn Her"), this is good stuff through and through.]
