Man, we are certainly liking us some country this year, aren’t we…
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[6.10]
Michaelangelo Matos: Advice you’ve already heard, in a way you’ve already heard it.
[5]
Chuck Eddy: Too lyrically unspecific to be my favorite track on Shine (that’d be “Wild Rebel Rose,” which is basically Martina’s “Janie’s Got A Gun” except better), but close. Nothing in the lyric feels the need to telegraph how much push and throb this song gets from its blues-rock guitar — and the prettiness and repeated words only help it groove more. She gets knocked down, but she gets up again, you’re never gonna keep her down.
[8]
Anthony Easton: I suspect that sharing a bottle of wine with McBride would only make her weepy, not free in any real sense of the word.
[4]
Martin Skidmore: McBride has a strong voice, but the medium pace and hackneyed arrangement offers her little, and the lyrics are tedious. I can take mediocre country rather more easily than most rubbish, in that the craft and singing are always skilled, but this is a dull record.
[4]
John Seroff: Twangy, catchy, red wine country with a lot of Pat Benatar in its DNA, “Wrong” is grown-up music, more wry than cutting. I like the way McBride handles the phrasing; even though the song never quite gets out of third gear, there’s enough momentum to carry this into multiple listenings. Recommended for the upward arc of the end of the breakup, right around when you’re cleaning up the last of their leftover shit out of the bathroom.
[7]
Alex Macpherson: McBride mops up a friend’s mess of a broken heart in a tender but efficient way; you believe that her heart’s in the right place, but not that she’s been there or understands in the way that, say, Taylor Swift does in “Fifteen”. The chant-along chorus is a big, rousing hook, which makes the song seem even more business-like.
[6]
Alfred Soto: Inside this stomper lies a narrative, but neither the guitars nor McBride’s voice coax it out; afraid they’ll bore us, they head right to the chorus. “Independence Day” excepted, she’s not particularly compelling enough of a singer to force me to pay attention anyway. So she lets the slide guitars moan wrong baby wrong.
[7]
Pete Baran: There is a hitch in “Wrong Baby Wrong” which makes the whole thing work. It’s a rueful piece of work, aiming for the smokey honkytonks, landing squarely in country music daytime radio — but there is nowt wrong with that. That said, once you realise what it’s going to do, there are few surprises. In that way at least it is like its near namesake, the Ben Affleck-directed film “Gone Baby Gone”; when you realise that Morgan Freeman did it, you have to wait around for half an hour til the film ends with its moral quandary.
[6]
Frank Kogan: Martina McBride’s voice feels so attractively warm and dependable you don’t think of her as the singer to produce wildness and lunacy. Paradoxically, her two best hits, “When God-Fearin’ Women Get The Blues” and “Independence Day“, are about going wild and out of control, one comically, the other with terrible destruction. Yet her reassuring warmth as a singer means that when she goes “let the right be wrong” in “Independence Day”, this rips open the world of the song while the greater moral order of the universe still feels whole. In “Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong” she’s all reassurance: “It ain’t the end of the world.” The guitars may have a different opinion, however, playing propulsive stutter chords in a style invented by Keith Richards in the early ’70s. The propulsion moves the song and she sways along with it while remaining essentially unruffled. She contains rock without being rocked.
[8]
Ian Mathers: I’ve heard good things about her, but this one at least is just pleasantly generic.
[6]