Review: Miranda Lambert at Susquehanna Bank Center

Miranda Lambert works the same thematic turf about growing up and growing older in rural America as her (almost entirely male) competitors atop the country charts. She just does it way better than they do.

The Texas songwriter's show at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden on Friday wasn't perfect. She did falter during "Over You," a banal power ballad that does not play to her strengths, and "Automatic," an admittedly catchy weak link on her formidable new album Platinum that goes in for an easy nostalgia that Lambert is usually too tough minded to fall for.

But other than that, Lambert's hour and half show before an amphitheater full of thoroughly stoked country fans was a model of consistency and intelligence.

A case in point would be "Famous In A Small Town." The 2007 song that Lambert performed with her top-notch road tested band couldn't help but draw comparisons to "Small Town, U.S.A.," the 2009 hit by Justin Moore, which closed the opening set by the Arkansas singer.

Moore, with his big belt buckle and bigger cowboy hat, brought the Camden crowd to its feet with feel good bromides. "Everybody knows me and I know them," he sang. "Wouldn't trade one single day, here in small town U.S.A."

Lambert, by contrast, leaves out the pandering patriotism, and, without condescending, depicts modest burgs like her hometown of Lindale, Texas as full of prying types all up in your business. "Every grandma, in law, ex-girlfriend knows you just a little too well." The irony is that while that claustrophobia motivates you leave home to make your mark, "everybody dies famous in a small town."

It helps, too, that Lambert is a woman in a field currently dominated by ball cap wearing bros happy to make hay with thinly disguised pop-rock that celebrates hoary country signifiers like the swimming hole, fire pit and that sweet thing in cut off jeans about to hop into your pickup truck.

The 30 year old guitarist countered by showing the Thelma and Louise-inspired video to her current single "Something Bad," a duet with Carrie Underwood, in which the transgressive women take money from dumb dudes and run. (Annoyingly, she never performed the song live, letting a big screen version do the work, just as rapper J. Cole did the previous weekend at Made in America, when he only showed the video for his Ferguson protest song "Be Free.")

Lambert followed "Something Bad" by taking the stage in black leather shorts and a Rolling Stones T-shirt to "Fastest Girl In Town" after a montage of female trailblazers - Sally Ride, Wilma Rudolph, Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English channel - played on the video screen.

That set the pistol packing feminist tone, veering between traditional leaning county and convincing rock and roll. Lambert strut her stuff on the raucous "Little Red Wagon," and put a cheat in her crosshairs "Gunpowder and Lead." She delighted her rowdy, probably 65% female audience by emblazoning the title to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History on the big screen, and made hard core country heads happy with a cover of Merle Haggard's "Misery & Gin."

Lambert spent more time brandishing her don't-mess-with-me persona than showing vulnerability, leaving "Bathroom Sink," the Platinum standout shot through with self-loathing, off the set list. But it wasn't only as a locked-and-loaded badass that she excelled: both the deeply felt and impressively sung "The House That Built Me" and gauzy "Smokin' and Drinkin'" trod well traveled ground, but avoided sentimental pitfalls to emerge tender and true, and not the least bit trite.

Previously: Kings of Leon and Tiesto close out Made in America Follow In The Mix on Twitter