by Erik HageWith To Be Loved, Ian Moore has fashioned his most challenging and experimental album yet, moving toward moody soundscapes, haunting beauty, and nervy energy. The title track makes mesmerizing and surprising shifts, from mellow to abrasive and back again, coming off like a John Lennon composition reimagined in a post-Wilco world. And it truly is Wilco that Moore evokes here, perhaps not directly in sound, but in that group's free-ranging, limitless tendencies to marry abrasion and beauty and noise and song -- and to not be held back by genre preconceptions. "Literary Kind" has a power pop-like storming energy that calls to mind early Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe, while "Civil Light" sounds like the soundtrack to a Southern gothic murder noir -- if it were rendered by David Bowie in Berlin. "30 Days" finds Moore landing straight back in the land of ear-pleasing power pop, a pose he strikes quite well. It might be hard to remember that a decade before this album's release Moore was known as a guitar prodigy in the blues-rock vein of Stevie Ray Vaughan and as a guitar slinging sideman for such folks as Joe Ely. Released in 2004, Luminaria found the transformation from hired guitar to master songwriter and sometimes experimental pop auteur complete. To Be Loved exceeds that mark; Moore has created a brand of challenging yet highly melodic new-millennium pop/rock that establishes him as an audacious songwriter and player. He has struck that rare balance between astute complexity and utter pop appeal.