Review of Upcoming David Moore Album

David Moore started his musical career as the lead singer of post-hardcore act Split Lip. His soaring vocals offered a sharp contrast to the band's often crushing guitar work and hardcore stomp. Moore owed much to bands like Embrace, but his style was even more clean, more precise. From there he went on to form Chamberlain. With this band the post-hardcore roots were still visible, but the mosh-ready breakdowns were ditched in favor of brooding musical passages and clear indie aesthetics.

Since the demise of Chamberlain Moore has been laying low, but now comes his first solo album, a record that shows just how strong Moore's voice has grown, but rock about as hard as an American Idol episode. On My Lover, My Stranger, Moore has ditched everything from his former bands in order to embrace a shiny pop-rock sound that would be right at home in dentist offices and Lifetime movie soundtracks. The batch of mid-tempo tracks that make up the album are wallowing and formulaic tunes that eschew "rock" at every turn, sounding like this is Moore's big attempt at scoring the sort of chart-topping hit his former bands never could.

Opener "After Everything I've Done" opens with orchestration and slide guitar before Moore slips in with his impassioned croon that now sounds more Daughtry than Chris Carraba. It's a predictable mess of a track with volume swells and backing vocals in all the right places. Things don't get any better on "Breaking You Down," a track that sounds like something Duncan Sheik wrote in 1996. On "Corners" Moore does his best imitation of "In Your Eyes" with a soft, subtle love song that will do more to cure insomnia than it will broken hearts. "Radiate" adds a bit of country twang to the already well-established formula, and well it doesn't help.

The second half of the album doesn't fare much better with a song like "Forgiven" attempting to pick up some life by aping "Tears of Jupiter," and a song like "Beautiful Now" feeling so cliché and unoriginal that it could have been performed by anyone from Jason Mraz to The Fray and no one would care.

Moore was once a powerful front-man and now he is just another wannabe pop star. It is truly surprising this album is being released on an independent label when all the music it contains is major label fodder. If you were a fan of Moore's older work, or even a fan of underground music, you may want to avoid this. My Lover, My Stranger is simply a boring, lifeless execution in pop-rock, one thatis easily lost amongst a bevy of similar artists.