Review: Morgan Wade’s heart-torn, lovelorn debut record, ‘Reckless’
Wade’s debut record drenches in pain and wisdom.
A windswept yearning feathers the record’s flinty foundation. And when she sings, unleashing a vinyl-scratching timbre so wonderfully stupefying, there’s little you don’t feel trembling right down to the bone. Morgan Wade’s debut Reckless unabashedly crushes the heart into powder, and your only solution is to watch the ruin blow away with the southbound winds. The Virginia original knows her way around a melody, truly finding crevices and dents into which to pour, quite generously, her velvet rasp. It’s both splintering and soothing.
When “Wilder Days” rumbles along like a 16-wheeler, kicking up choking clouds of dust, Wade’s voice is one of deep yearning, sinewy in all the right spots. “I wish I’d known you in your wilder days,” she crows about falling for an older man. It’s a country-rock set-up for a 10-track record, produced by Sadler Vaden and Paul Ebersold, that goes all in on the pain. She has no other choice than to exhibit her life as it is in the cold light of day. “Other Side” peers back to her pre-sober days, reflecting upon her boyfriend, who’s known her through every intoxicating high and terrible low. With “Mend,” the only album track written during that time, she singularly captures the intense emotional thrill of it all. “Come to bed and I will shut my mouth / And I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she sings, a tortured spirit painstakingly squeezing her lungs dry.
Wade fearlessly dances with the devil — winding the listener through dark, hallowed halls of the worst of the worst. A display of brokenness is truly commendable (she pleads as much with “Mend”) and boils over with “Last Cigarette,” a thumping metaphor for any toxic thing in life. “Addiction is strong, I know it’s wrong / But I need that high, I ain’t gonna lie,” she sings with a bit of a shrug.
“Tryna make sense of this whole thing / Everybody runs from something, someday,” Wade later observes, the title cut bringing together various loose ends about reckless, senseless behaviors. Her voice is cool, presenting the truths as they are rather than outright admonishing any of it. What’s done is done, as evidenced in bright, brutal beauty throughout Reckless — and all there is left to do is move right along to the next stop.
