Allison Moorer: The Hardest Part : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This twenty-eight-year-old's stunning alto voice has the wide-screen sweep of a movie about the back roads of Alabama. That cinematic effect is the star of The Hardest Part, Moorer's follow-up to her 1998 debut, Alabama Song. Occasionally, the album meshes, and the music is transporting, like when Moorer is on a groove with striking strings and melodic peaks on "It's Time I Tried." But more often, as on the slow, wailing "Bring Me All Your Lovin'," Moorer concentrates on the power of pronunciation, rhyming "bring" and "sang," with the kind of flat-A sound you hear on dusty Faulknerian porches. Many country fans, unimpressed with the pop high jinks of Shania Twain and Faith Hill, favor this approach, and Moorer delivers it with conviction and authority; but for now, she is still a work in progress. (RS 851)

JAMES HUNTER