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Date: 05:20:17 on Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Name: Neverending
Subject: Alison Moorer - Crows (2010)

Country music was merely a starting point for Allison Moorer. A decade ago she put deep feeling and finesse into making a few albums of it first for one, then another major label. But her voice—that supple, sultry instrument—begged for wider expressive territory; roots plus pop and rock and soul and points beyond. And so she blended all that for a few albums.

This one, though, falls nowhere on Moorer’s established stylistic continuum. Crows has nothing to do with country music, least of all its concise, concrete approach to songwriting. These songs are expansive and impressionistic, and as such, they call for a different sort of listening. Against the chill, jazz club sophistication of “Goodbye To the Ground,” the lyrics have the feel of modern poetry, built of brief image-rich lines rather than narrative. And the title track isn’t exactly a linear verse-chorus journey; the spry British-sounding piano waltz ebbs and flows, breaks off and shifts into other modes by way of a lavish orchestral arrangement. And all this is not what we’re used to hearing from Moorer.

The same can be said of the album’s age-shifting mid-section. The slow-burning blue pop of “Should I Be Concerned” and sensual melancholy of “Still This Side of Gone” are chances for her to work up mature, emotionally nuanced vocal performances. Between those songs come a pair of childhood reveries that are all innocence, free of the turmoil that colors her other memory-mining songs, like “How She Does It” on Getting Somewhere. “Easy In the Summertime” and “Stars and I” are both tender, ethereal, musically simple songs; the former conjures warm, sensory memories of a southern summer and the latter is a childlike expression of love. They’re connected between tracks by crystalline chiming, reminiscent of a music box.

It’s not that Moorer has found a new producer to lead her new places. Actually, she’s back working with R.S. Fields (for the fourth time, counting the live Show). Writing on piano—her first instrument—rather than the usual guitar gave the songs a fresh, profoundly fluid feel. Fields buoyed it with nimble nylon-string, with the occasional Spanish tinge, and Joe McMahon’s sylphlike electric figures—no heavy strumming (or heavy anything) to speak of.

Fields also supplied “It’s Gonna Feel Good,” a shadowy song that lets Moorer testify to the mysterious process of emerging from pain with easy, been-there authority. But it’s during the dreamy singer-songwriter soul of “Like the Rain”—practically weightless in feel—that she gets at the way of thinking that makes an album like this possible: “I’m through makin’ plans/I don’t care where I stand/I’d rather be like the rain.” It sounds like she’s found her freedom.

01. Abalone Sky
02. Goodbye To The Ground
03. Just Another Fool
04. The Broken Girl
05. Should I Be Concerned
06. When You Wake Up Feeling Bad
07. Easy In The Summertime
08. The Stars & I (Mama's Song)
09. Still This Side Of Gone
10. Like The Rain
11. Sorrow (Don't Come Around)
12. It's Gonna Feel Good (When It Stops Hurting)
13. Crows

Alison Moorer - Crows

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