Meet the R. Stevie Moore! (Digital Only,Collection)

Album Review

A full 40 years after Nashville high school student Robert Steven Moore received his first multi-track tape recorder from his session musician father Bob Moore, Meet the R. Stevie Moore is the highest profile release so far by the father of D.I.Y. home recording. Given the sheer volume of songs Moore has recorded in the intervening decades — the online catalog at his website now lists over 400 CDs, all but a handful self-released — no single anthology can cover the best of his work. Even limiting these 25 songs to the years between 1974 and 1986 (generally considered Moore's most consistently solid period, and certainly his most productive), there are still at least two or three more CDs' worth of worthy contenders that didn't make this anthology. (No "Manufacturers"? No "Part of the Problem"? No "Bloody Knuckles"?) That said, it's difficult for an R. Stevie Moore fan to argue with this selection of tunes, a top to bottom solid and well-sequenced anthology that focuses on Moore's very real gifts as a pop songwriter, equally adept at both smart, funny rockers (the British Invasion-inspired "You and Me," the Sparks-like "She Don't Know What to Do with Herself") and wistful ballads (the simply gorgeous acoustic reverie "Hobbies Galore" and the richly melodic "Play Myself Some Music," the near-perfect jangle of "I Wanna Hit You," the best song Big Star never wrote). To give a fully-rounded portrait, the anthology also contains a couple of Moore's trademark oddball tunes, "Goodbye Piano" and "Puttin' Up the Groceries" as well as some of his more creative experiments, such as the chipmunk-voice disco-synth fragment "Horizontal Hideaway" and (included as an unlisted bonus track following the manic falsetto rocker "Adult Tree") the transcendentally spooky electronic waltz "Terribly Honest." Perhaps the most representative anthology so far released of R. Stevie Moore's enormous output outside of some of his own occasional best-of CD-Rs, Meet the R. Stevie Moore should in fact create some new converts. There's plenty Moore where this came from.