Emmylou Harris Wrecking Ball

3.5 Stars - Good - "...Harris floats in some netherland amid country, rock and folk. Her latest album turns this stylistic ambiguity into a stunning virtue....a wrenching collection of songs that merges popular and historical styles like a 1990s rethink of the Band..."
"...the biggest stretch of her career....the album plucks Harris from the safe ground of pristine country ballads and acoustic rave-ups and plops her squarely in the middle of idiosyncratic, New Age-y pop rock..." - Rating: A-
Included in Q's 50 Best Albums of 1995 - "...a timely reminder of just how fabulous a singer Emmylou Harris is..."
"...nothing in Harris' catalog prepares a listener for the leap she takes....[she] nudges her vocals gingerly into places as if completing a complex jigsaw puzzle....There are moments...that approximate...fleeting epiphany....WRECKING BALL isn't 'country music,' not by a long shot..."
Village Voice (2/20/96) - Ranked #12 in Village Voice's 1995 Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll.
"...She steps off the edge into heavy rhythm tracks and instruments deployed as atmospheric noise while attention focuses on her voice - reaching low, straining high, letting elegance take care of itself..."
Included on Stephen Holden's list of the Top 10 Albums of '95 - "...eerie, atmospheric collaboration....a queen of country steps down from her pedestal to sing...with a frayed urgency..."
Paste (magazine) - "It was, simply, a watershed. Emmylou Harris, with her song sense, acute rhythm guitar playing and set-on-stun gift as a vocal gut-leveler, was suddenly free to find the essence of her gift."