Last year, when Martina McBirde bucked conven­tional wisdom and released the single “Independence Day,” the simple but devastating tale of an abused wife who seizes control of her life, you could hear cracks rumbling through country radio’s years of resistance to new female artists. With her new album, Wild Angels, Martina McBride should shatter them altogether. To put it bluntly, Wild Angels is a mainstream country album, both deeply per­sonal - the first sound on the record is the cry of McBride’s newborn daughter - and expert­ly crafted. McBride wrote none of the songs on Wild Angels, but the album coheres as if she’d written every one.

Taken as a whole, the album concerns the need to take control of your life without losing your spirit and your belief in some­thing larger than yourself - love, family, the great beyond. Individually, each song is state-of-­the-art Nashville circa 1995, a seamless blend of traditional elements and contemporary studio wizardry with a hint of 7Os country-rock. In “Phones Arc Ringin’ All Oyer Town” McBride sings of a wife’s revenge on her cheating husband, while the sublime production (by McBride, Ed Seay and Paul Worley) segues almost sublimi­nally from spare piano backing to full band orchestration. The Kennedy-Rose song “Safe in the Arms of love” becomes a soar­ing anthem of security, while McBride takes a footloose road­house romp trough “Swingin’ Doors” and Delbert McClinton’s “Two More Bottles of Wine.”

While it all works beautifully, from Levon Helm’s weather-beaten harmonies on “Cry on the Shoulder of the Road” to the Beatlesque melody of “Beyond the Blue,” the biggest treasure is a ballad called “All the Things We’ve Never Done.” On their anniversary night, a husband apologizes to his wife for the tings he’s never given her: In a voice hushed with tenderness, she thanks him instead for the other things they’ve never shared - heartache, betrayal, regret. It’s one of those songs that’ll cause you to remember where you were t e first time you heard it; it’s also one of those songs that reminds you why, at its best, modern country music still addresses the basic truths of life in ways tat pop and rock seem to have deserted.

Good ol’ boys in the indus­try, particularly at country radio, used to say that the only thing distinguishing the female artists who broke in the early 1990s was their hairstyles. Well, guess what, guys: It’s women like Mar­tina McBride, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shania Twain, Car­lene Carter, Pam Tillis and Kim Richey who arc providing the individual voices and the thrill of discovery in country music these days - and it’s the men who are becoming a sea of interchange­able hats. If the women keep making records as superb as Wild Angels, the men aren’t going to be missed.

Jim Ridley