Review Summary: By far the best Morgan in mainstream Country today, but how far does that get you?
It’s a truism, a cliché, to say that a great album is more than the sum of its parts. The hard part is in identifying the qualities that make it such. It’s been a minute since Morgan Wade broke out with the support of artists like Jason Isbell, and with 3 albums in the space of 4 years, she’s shown no signs of stopping. Time’s found her now in a supporting slot for no less an icon than Alanis Morissette, and her music videos consistently rack up views in the millions. All of which says nearly nothing about Wade’s actual history as an artist, but when her material is so autobiographical and personal, it’s better to let the music speak for itself. On
Obsessed Morgan Wade as a personality still seems to outshine Morgan as a musician, but there’s plenty of grit here to make the case that all that’s because she’s just that much of a personality, rather than any real musical weakness. The album’s almost complete reliance on a few touchstones of the genre, the heartfelt odes, neon-lit barroom sobbers, backward glances down lonely highways, tattoos of names that no longer show up on the phone, are all aspects that Morgan makes her own, with cool confidence and gracefulness. So why don’t they add up to a great country album?
What clicks about
Obsessed is that Morgan’s is a glossy, forward-looking sensibility within a traditional sound, a slickness that, for much of the album, actually works in its favor. The reason for this formula’s success is a little more amorphous. After all, slick is so often synonymous with shallow that (especially in this genre) it becomes shorthand for disposable. To get at the reason it works in this case, let me contrast a bit with another very fine recent country release, Ella Langley’s
Hungover. Both work quite squarely within the country confines, both are very real and raw in their approach to the confessional side of the genre, both have a verve and grit that are necessary for country to be anything more than its worst tendencies. But where Langley sounds like she’s singing in a sawdust-strewn backwater with George Strait’s backing band, Wade feels more polished, more urbane, even at her most confessional. Conversely, where Langley is more romantic, and more messy in her fullhearted attack on life, on
Obsessed, Wade is much the more wistful of the two; many times she’s able to communicate a genuine sense of longing that most country artists only wish they could. There’s a dignity to that wistfulness that ends up missing from
Hungover. These stories are no strangers to despair, drug abuse and heartbreak, but the poise that they’re expressed in gives each of these songs a sense of maturity and depth that is deeply hard to find nowadays.
The depth of
Obsessed, then, and the fact that it works so well from piece to piece, is in its contrast between its slick and easy hooks and squeaky-clean production, and the genuine heart with which Wade breaks open the books of past loves and longings. If it was a simple matter of tugging at the heartstrings on every song, she might have the album of the year. But like Adele, who takes much the same aesthetic tack, good songs don’t necessarily, in and of themselves, make for a good album. When there are only so many ways to spin these tales, and when they all more or less cover the same musical ground, it eventually wears thin. A unitive approach to an album only works when the collective elements all contribute something unique to the whole, but by the time I’d got to Reality, a little more than halfway through, I’d already felt like I’d gleaned everything from this album that I was going to. Even if all of the songs on the rest of the album were just as fine as what had gone before, it all began to feel redundant. And that’s the damn shame of it, because with a more varied musical or lyrical approach, Morgan might have had a stellar country album on her hands. But there’s a line between beautifully simple and overly simplistic, and here, Morgan drifts slightly to the wrong side of it.
