Allison Moorer Takes Radio-Friendly Road

LOS ANGELES (LA Times) - In her third solo album (due in stores Tuesday), this Alabama-bred singer steps away from her neo-traditionalist country music stance for a more pop-edged, radio-friendly approach, complete with lots of string-assisted gloss.

That's reasonable enough considering that Moorer, younger sister of Shelby Lynne, simply wasn't getting anywhere commercially with her old sound--even though her last album, 2000's "The Hardest Part," was among the most acclaimed CDs to come out of Nashville in recent years. More than the sound, the problem with "Miss Fortune" is the material.

It's tempting to think that anyone with as soulful a voice as Moorer's can make almost any song work. This album shoots down that theory. Several of the tunes, including "Tumbling Down" and "Cold in California," are so conventional that even she is unable to breathe life into them.

Moorer, who co-wrote most of the material with husband Doyle Primm, infuses a few songs, including the melancholy "Let Go" and the stark, disillusioned "Dying Breed," with some of the raw emotion and revelation that made the last album so striking. She also kicks up her heels nicely on "Ruby Jewel Was Here."

All too often, however, you get the feeling that Moorer and the production team of Primm and R.S. Field devoted so much time to the album's musical design that they lost track of the challenge of actually saying something.