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Wringing beauty from her pain, Moorer creates music that illustrates an age-old truism: Without sorrow, there is no joy.
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Though the disc starts off unhurried and threatens to dawdle, the gentle lilt of "Goodbye to the Ground," makes for one of Moorer's most creative efforts to date.
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With her songwriting on point (she's always had a weakness for obvious, forced rhymes, but her discovery of slant and blank rhyme leave just a couple such offenders intact) and with her distinctive contralto in exquisite form, Moorer's performance here is arguably a career best.
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"Crows" opts for a mostly stripped-down acoustic sound that provides the perfect setting for Moorer's marvelous, R&B-inflected voice.
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Covering the likes of Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, and Nina Simone on last year’s “Mockingbird’’ seems to have rubbed off on her. “Crows’’ is a striking album.
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If Crows was the first album from a new artist, it would certainly be hailed as the debut of a powerful new voice, and the fact that it comes from someone who has already been making fine music in notably different styles makes the accomplishment all the more impressive.
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Occasionally augmented by beautifully restrained strings, there’s a kind of heat-haze shimmer evident, of a kind that gave Bobbie Gentry’s sound some of its mystery and magic.
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Moorer strips away the nursery rhymes that sometimes plagued her output and instead focuses on song narratives that break from traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. The result is richly rewarding.
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The songs could use more steam, but Crows reveals yet another color in Moorer's palette.
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UncutToo much of it is lost in homogeneous country balladry more often associated with Trish Yearwood and all the other Nashville guff. A pity, because Moorer's voice is an expressive thing. [Mar 2010, p.94]
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Moorer's handsome voice is remarkably twangless here. Also remarkable is that the most indelible of her goth-chick musings is the happiest-sounding.
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Crows isn’t without merit—Moorer’s voice is beautiful, and the themes are on an emotional canvas that anyone over 13 with a normal amount of chromosomes has experienced, making her album relatable if not particularly memorable.