ALBUM REVIEW: Ashley McBryde’s ‘Wild’ Offers Raucous Redemption and Hope
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and
Black News 
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and trauma, even as those tears contain within themselves the faint light of redemption and hope.
The album opens with the prowling, growling rocker “Rattlesnake Preacher,” full of screaming lead guitars, squealing fiddles, and McBryde’s soaring vocals. The song captures perfectly the defiant tone of a fundamentalist preacher whose message about the love of Jesus is cloaked in a narrow hellfire and damnation vision of salvation. The echoing psychedelic country rocker “Arkansas Mud” swaggers boldly as McBryde testifies to the depths of, and embraces, her Arkansas upbringing. On the instrumental bridge Black Sabbath-like guitar licks play call and response to bluegrass mandolin runs.
