ALLISON MOORER > Mockingbird

She with the dusky voice of musk, invitation and knowing has built a career out of building songs based on moments of ache and recognition.

Label: New Line
[Rating: 3 STARS]

She with the dusky voice of musk, invitation and knowing has built a career out of building songs based on moments of ache and recognition. Strength has always been Oscar-nominee Allison Moorier’s suit-and at a time when she enlists roots wizard Buddy Miller to ply an even more organic stew of instruments, the Alabama-born singer/songwriter makes herself even more vulnerable by jettisoning what she knows for what she feels, thinks, believes. Celebrating female songwriters. Moorer takes the throbbing exuberance of Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot” and juxtaposes it with Joni Mitchell’s knowingly raw “The Circle Game,” Nina Simone’s bawdy wink “Sugar In My Bowl” with June Carter’s sexual obsession/terror “Ring of Fire”-and creates new meanings, deeper perspectives and dignity among the distaff side. Kate McGarrigle’s “Go, Leave” is the better woman’s release-and-catch…and it’s the backwards reality of double X chromosomes that make this the soundtrack for pheromones at their most dizzying.