Some artists spend their careers in a rut.  Allison Moorer’s music is more fluid, so spends her drifting between other artist’s ruts.  On Crows she has opted to pitch her tent firmly in the middle of Norah Jones territory and attempts to make it her own.  The attempts are mostly successful, but there is a certain lackluster quality in trying to find Allison Moorer in the middle of  all the muddle.  In the current galaxy of Americana singers, Moorer remains a star, shining dimly and desperately trying to be seen among the planets and comets around her.

Moorer wrote all of the songs on Crows, except for the RS Field penned “Its Gonna Feel Better When It Starts Hurting.”  Her move away from co-writers marks one of few good decisions made on this album.  Her song balances a stark imagery with a sense of sparseness that suits her melancholy mood very well.  Occasionally, her writing gets away from her.  On Crows, for example, the wry line “I guess a crow in the yard is better than bats in the belfry” is tacked onto the end of the song and never really built upon or really connected to the rest of the melody.  However, most of her writing is beautiful and evocative.  “I wish I had known/instead of getting my hopes up/They’re hanging by a thread/ heavy in the air/But let them linger there,” she says as she morns the impending demise of a relationship in “Still This Side of Gone” Elsewhere, she claims on protagonist “she reserves the right to be sullen” while asking of another “Who broke her in two/Many pieces she will never find.”  “Easy in the Summer Time” finds her linking a collection of childhood images into the perfect summer day.  Taken as a whole, Crows features what is easily the deepest and prettiest songwriting Allison Moorer has ever done.

After the songwriting, there isn’t a lot left to catch a listener’s ear.  Allison Moorer still has one of the best voices in the industry, but here it is handled with the care and attention normally reserved for filing routine paperwork.  The burnished brandy voice that elevated such songs as Steal the Sun and Best That I Can Do is gone, and in its place is a forced attempt to turn whiskey into spun sugar.  The production does not help matters.  Layered, atmospheric backing instrumentals often bury Moorer’s vocals.  The arrangements very often build around repeated melodies, building towards a fade out vocal track.  This makes the songs sound cookie cutter and keeps even the best tracks from standing out as much as they might.  If you get your cd from I Tune you can get a heartbreaking sample of what might have been via acoustic tracks.  With all the wall of sound excesses stripped away, these are beautiful, heartbreaking ballads.   Unfortunately, that album was buried under a mess or production and it never quite digs it way out.

So, for all of its flaws, is Crows worth buying?  The answer is, yes, maybe.  I came of age, musically, in an era when Lilith Fair was coming together and I like Norah Jones.  If you have Sarah McLaughlin in your collection, particularly if you also own Rachel Fuller or Paula Cole, there will certainly be a place in your collection for this album.  It is not, however, the album which will turn anyone onto atmospheric pop.  And there in, lies the true tragedy of this album—it involves one of the most unforgettable artists in music today making one of her most forgettable albums to date.