Consumer Guide Album

Morgan Wade: Psychopath [RCA, 2023]
Celebrating her adolescent attraction to Sylvia Plath, her abiding admiration for Alanis Morrisette, her hard-won sobriety, and her refusal to join the 27 Club, this builder's daughter from small-town Virginia wrote or cowrote 14 well-put new Nashville love/sex songs that presage more to come and make you wonder where they'll take her professionally once she pieces the emotional details together. Exceptionally gifted and ambitious for the work in progress she remains, Wade's music exemplifies Nashville's evolution away from downhome country toward a less regional style of autobiographical pop that when you think about it has its roots in the punk and disco '70s, when big-city singer-songwriters began emigrating to a burg more amenable to their confessional aesthetic. Less given to braggadocio than the men they settle for, the gals have done a lot more with this aesthetic than the guys, few if any of whom would risk a title like "Psychopath," which turns out to be a pet name a boyfriend she's too good for has laid on her. A-