But more than anything, we love heartbreak…

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[7.50]

Alfred Soto: Here’s how to imagine and inhabit a conceit without fuss. That’s Ashley Monroe’s way. Slipping into scenarios like a thief with good tools, she caresses words with her whiskery burr. In a song full of precise images, the simplest line is the best: “For you, it’s over; for me, it’s not.”
[8]

Ramzi Awn: Gifted with the same brand of tenacity as Pistol Annies, Monroe’s voice sounds perfectly at home in the honey-soaked mix on “The Blade.”
[8]

Micha Cavaseno: A decent play with imagery conveying a delicate balance of hurt with exasperation, and a fairly conservative but unoffensive arrangement. Nothing for me to hate on, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Or for anything, really.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Monroe’s sophomore solo album is a move forward from her first, in both song selection and, especially, her singing, which is warmer and richer. Vince Gill’s production is more solid, too, with an analog, old Nashville feel; the closest comparison I can come up with is to Lee Ann Womack’s 2005 masterpiece There’s More Where That Came From. The album’s title track is one of its highest points, a painful description of the end of a relationship’s end: a Cliffs Notes version of a Bergman film set in Tennessee. 
[10]

Anthony Easton: In the last two years the obsession of female domesticity has been reworked by a cadre of brilliant women performers and writers. Monroe’s details about small-town exhaustion, and her ability to tell stories, are unparalleled in contemporary Nashville except maybe Sunny Sweeney. The metaphor is sharp as the titular instrument, but the details are honed tight and hard against that metaphor. The sweetness of her voice twists the knife deeper and deeper.
[10]

Megan Harrington: The sophisticated production is a bit cheesily adult contemporary, but “The Blade” resonates. It’s a great metaphor for unrequited love, sleekly carved wood in one person’s hand and a severed aorta for the other. But what really puts this song over is the patient and straightforward way Monroe delivers her parable. She’s making gentle eye contact, leaning in fondly, cocking her head to one side in commiseration, and I feel nurtured and understood.
[8]

Katherine St Asaph: The divide is not between bro-country and women. Nor is it between trad-country vs. pop-country, which is what industry types (down to Monroe herself) are trying to reframe the debate as, it being well-used rhetoric. It’s about kids vs. adults, about marketing and demographics, and about whose stories are heard: the sorority girl and party boy, or the woman with a rueful life and a hard past (“like an old piano played for generations“), whose songs always seem to come back to that inescapable fact: between men and women, the handle and the blade are always held the same way. “The Blade” begins bracing, razors against hearts and violent games, but soon settles into what its arrangement suggests: classicist songwriting, a portfolio piece. Nashville loves portfolio pieces — the mythic career-making songs, as programmer Gerry House somewhat oversimplified it — and there’s a comforting simplicity to the best of those songs: familiar and easy to slip into as a childhood bed. But they don’t tend to bleed.
[6]

Brad Shoup: Two ways of reading the contrast between verse and bridge came to mind: the first is that the visceral metaphor is made misty by Monroe threading some resignation in. But that’s not it. Her lover needs to comprehend some part of the wound in order to recognize how slow the healing can be. “The Blade” is a songwriter’s tune, nudged along by glum piano, mewling guitar, and not too much steel. It’s startling, but ultimately not devastating, and that’s fine.
[6]