Brooke Moriber’s new album Cry Like a Girl

Galloping grooves join forces with a homespun harmony in an effort to sweep all of our cares away with the wind in “Time Takes It’s Time,” one of eleven tracks to be found on Brooke Moriber’s new album Cry Like a Girl, but this isn’t the only instance in the record where catharsis will reign supreme. From the pendulous piano play in “The Last Goodbye” (the album’s first single and music video) to the magnetizing melodies of “Behind the Scenes,” Moriber will stop at nothing in her mission to make us experience her artistry like we never have before, and for the most part, she hits it out of the park in Cry Like a Girl. It’s a little bit country and a whole lot of adult contemporary pop, and it’s a listen that fans of both genres might want to take a look at this spring.

Countrified grooves give “The Devil I Know” and the title track more of an edge than what we hear in the somber “Shattered Glass” and “It Doesn’t Hurt,” and despite the diversity in this collection of ballads and boisterous anthems, Cry Like a Girl enjoys a really fluid tracklist that feels rather progressive when compared to similarly stylized records out this April. “Here and Gone,” “99 Days of Rain” and “Steal the Thunder” are designed using completely different styles of attack, but they’re ultimately cut from the same meticulously crafted sonic cloth as “Long Long Time,” “The Last Goodbye” and “Time Takes It’s Time” are.

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“It Doesn’t Hurt” and “Steal the Thunder” feel a bit stock when juxtaposed with the more calculated “The Last Goodbye” and formidable “Shattered Glass,” but I don’t know that I would go as far as to call either of the songs “filler” per-say. There’s a couple of aesthetical growing pains present in Cry Like a Girl, but by and large they’re limited to the cosmetic side of the songwriting (something that could be easily remedied in future works). I think that Moriber has got more charm as a singer when she’s flirting with Americana-tinged folk-rock in tracks like “The Devil I Know” and “Here and Gone” than she does anything else, and with a voice like hers, there’s never any need for external bells and whistles to enter the mix.

Fans of country, folk, pop and roots music should check out what Brooke Moriber is up to in the studio right now the next time that they’re in the market for hot new records, as Cry Like a Girl introduces us to her sound in a full-color, high definition setting that her caliber of content is definitely deserving of. She’s got a limitless ambition that is on full display in this LP, and despite a few hiccups, these eleven songs hold their own with most anything else I’ve heard out of Nashville in the last few months of 2019. Only time will tell, but if she keeps on this same creative trajectory that she’s been on for the last year, it won’t be long before Moriber shares a full-length follow-up to this fascinating first album.

Mindy McCall