Allison Moorer: Miss Fortune : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

If there's a more soulful country singer than Allison Moorer working these days, she's doing a damn good job of keeping herself hidden. Moorer's Alabama Song (1998) and The Hardest Part (2000) are already familiar to anyone with a taste for bighearted Southern melodrama; like her sister Shelby Lynne, she's left the Nashville formula behind. On her third album, Miss Fortune, the crimson-haired Alabamian had a hand in writing all but one of the thirteen songs. Like many veterans of the Nineties country boom, she has matured into a slick Seventies style of singer-songwriter soft rock, with average song length creeping up to the four-and-a-half-minute range. The low-energy opener, "Tumbling Down," comparing love to a painting, makes you fear the worst, especially when the strings come in. But Moorer steams it up with the heartbreak ballads "Cold in California," "Dying Breed" and "Yessirree" and gets nasty in barrelhouse rockers such as "Going Down." In the best song here, she warns that a sleeve is "No Place for a Heart," but let's hope Moorer keeps ignoring her own advice.

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 904 - September 5, 2002)