How about releasing another single off that Pistol Annies record, Miranda?
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[5.25]
Katherine St Asaph: If you’re going to rip off “Free Fallin’,” could you at least get the hook too?
[4]
Sabina Tang: Sounds puzzlingly like the b-side to an upbeat J-pop dance track that happens to be released in December, thus mandating the inclusion of a “Christmassy” mid-tempo ballad on the maxi-single (alongside two prog house remixes). …Well, no, it’s Miranda Lambert, so less filler-ish than that, but still falls well short of impact. And it’s meant to be February; the lyrics even say so.
[5]
Pete Baran: Well done Miranda, your death ballad has been added to the small but vital list of songs which accurately articulate the Kübler-Ross model of grief.
[8]
Alfred Soto: Her weakest album generates her weakest single. If Lambert hadn’t repeatedly proven that she can show vulnerability without renouncing an inch of her independence, I might overlook the moist chorus and boring identi-riff.
[4]
Anthony Easton: Maybe the weakest single off Four the Record, but over a few dozen listens, what I first dismissed as a kind of syrup-laced melancholy turned more bitter and less sugar. She seemed to only have two modes: angry or rueful; this track suggests a balancing third way.
[8]
Iain Mew: Oof, there’s something horribly contrived about the February/scary/December/remember verse which drags this down right from the beginning. Everything else is pleasant but there’s not enough content, in narrative or musical terms, to save it after a first impression like that.
[4]
Brad Shoup: “But you went away/How dare you/I miss you” — I certainly grant that a breakup song can be all the more poignant for fixing onto the absence, but “Over You” tries to invoke the break and fumbles it spectacularly. Perhaps Lambert and Shelton found it too gloomy a prospect to conjure exactly how a relationship might end, thus the childish summation of the chorus. Meanwhile, the mandolin plucks away in the background, like idle fingers tapping a countertop. Even the modern-rock roar of the bridge gets snuffed before it can display any life.
[4]
John Seroff: At her best, Lambert evades the tropes of pop-country with songs that transcend genre and demand attention as new classics. This is not her best. Cliched lyrics, rote “Free Falling” presentation and the monotony of one-up-one-down vocal delivery all grow weary quickly. It’s above average fare but that’s more a referendum on “average”. I am hard pressed to believe there’s not a stronger follow up on Four the Record; hell, I know there’s better material on there.
[5]