ALBUM REVIEW: India Ramey Pairs Power With Vulnerability on ‘Baptized by the Blaze’

On her new album Baptized by the Blaze, India Ramey is here to kick ass, play honky-tonk, and chew bubblegum — and she’s all out of gum. She’s also out of Klonopin; this album details Ramey’s life-affirming experience of working through childhood trauma to end her reliance on the anxiety drug. Ramey presents a fascinating portrait of a honky-tonk queen who shows the way to having a good time even while expressing her vulnerability.

We want our honky-tonk queens to express a careless, love-’em-and-leave-’em attitude to the world, a mythical woman who takes no shit and leaves the mess for others in her pursuit of a good time. Ideally, our honky-tonk queens break hearts as often as theirs are broken: a woman with the same freedom as her outlaw cowboy counterpart but with a cheerful wink instead of a brooding eye toward the horizon. But what’s really going on underneath that mask?

Baptized by the Blaze answers that question with confidence and a careful artistry — but Ramey doesn’t slow the party down. The album kicks off with “Ain’t My First Rodeo,” a brash rejection of the kind of overinflated cowboy poseur that dominates the songs of honky-tonk angels. Ramey takes her unfortunate target down a few pegs with relish and clever wordplay, supported by a superlative band whose energy cranks up the heat of Ramey’s ire. Just as intensely, we swerve to “Baptized by the Blaze,” an equally lively boot stomper about moving through trauma and coming out the other side with pride and joy in one’s newfound strength.

This momentum makes “Piece of My Mind” all the more impactful. Here, Ramey centers her voice on an acoustic-driven track that admonishes others for making assumptions about her. With a masterful opening verse, Ramey peels back the layers of the album’s blistering opening — sure, we all make mistakes that seem like fun at the time, and maybe we can even laugh about them later, but they still take their toll.

That soft moment makes Ramey’s performances on “The Mountain” and “Never Going Back” all the more remarkable. As Ramey reclaims her power on the former, her voice keens like the winds of adversity she braves. On “Never Going Back,” Ramey takes on a driven single-mindedness reminiscent of Sarah Shook & The Disarmers. By virtue of their versatility, Ramey and her band teach us that honky-tonk queens have hearts that can break, and healing begets scar tissue.

Ramey presents us with a series of dichotomies on Baptized by the Blaze: the angel and the sinner, the lone rider and the longing for companionship, the life of the party and the lonely philosopher, the triumphant hero and the tender seeker. We all live somewhere in between those spaces at some point, and Ramey gifts us with the bravery to accept ourselves at all these points.

India Ramey’s Baptized by the Blaze is out Aug. 23 on Mule Kick Records.