Time Turns the Moon

Tret Fure begins her fourth album with "Blame It on the Day," perhaps the most abject apology in song ever recorded. "I didn't mean the things I said," she begins, and goes on for three verses of self-abasement that are set to a surprisingly rocking tune complete with Bo Diddley beat and stinging electric guitar work from Paul Davis. The contrast between the hapless words and the hopping music tends to undercut the lyrical message; is she really as sorry as she says? This isn't the only time on the album that there seems to be such a deliberate disconnection. In "The Working Poor," one of several socially conscious songs on the album set against the straightforward depiction of people struggling to make ends meet in an unfair economic system, the mood is buoyed up by a Cajun arrangement featuring Kevin Wimmer's accordion and fiddle. But both of these songs are somewhat atypical of the album as a whole, which is dominated by songs played by a core band of Davis, keyboardist Nick Milo, bassist Benny Reitveld, and drummer Kevin Hayes in a late-'80s, early-'90s contemporary pop style that, stylistically anyway, would seem to entitle Fure to a place on MTV and hit radio; that is, it would if she were not stereotyped by her association with Second Wave, a subsidiary of Olivia Records, the leading label for women's music. The designation seems unduly restrictive; the album contains several love songs, but the only track that seems to hint at the possibility of same-sex relationships is the bouncy "The Girls All Dance," which coyly states that if, at the high school prom, the boys insist on being wallflowers, the girls will have no choice except to dance with each other. Fure is a mature singer/songwriter who maintains a good sense of the sound of the current hit parade, even if popular prejudices preclude her inclusion in it.