As a female singer-songwriter who escaped the teen-pop assembly line and sold tens of millions of records without once getting her tits out for the lads, Ms Morissette would be worthy of cherishing even if her records really were as yowlingly dull as claimed by the male rock arbiters who still consider Jim Morrison's ego-babble evidence of great poetic talent and Sting's pronouncements on Russians reliably deep.
Probably the one thing that won't be noted about "So-Called Chaos" - in amongst the sneering observations that she's finally got a "decent haircut" and a boyfriend – is just how much bravery, common sense and – call the papers! – humour there is in the word-stuffed lines of these songs. At this late date, it's getting increasingly difficult to make the "dreary psychobabble" tag stick, leastways if you're listening. "Spineless" and "Doth I Protest Too Much" present an alternately wry and despairing caricature of that self-negation process every woman will recognise.
"Eight Easy Steps", the album's barrellingly power-chord-powered opener and clear standout, is laugh-out loud hilarious in its beady-eyed, self-mocking take on hypocrisy and self-deception ("I've been doing research for years/I've been practicing my ass off"). And - with the kind of fearlessness you'd search long and hard for even in the rarefied likes of Leonard Cohen, let alone Muse - the love letter that is "Everything" combines paens of unabashed generosity with as much wisdom and humility as Morissette says she sees in the object of her affections.
And yeah, sure, this album - like its predecessors - is a corporate rock record: big, bold, glossy, shiny, not noticeably hip in any of the ways hip is shiftingly defined, but certainly not without uplift, and as prettily sung as anything she's yet done. Great swathes of it are as giddy and uplifting as music designed to be played on the radio gets: "Not All Me" twinkles and pulses like sunlight on water; the sitar-festooned, giddily punning "Knees Of My Bees" zings and swells; "Out Is Through" is acoustic simplicity on a radiant, arena-sized scale. And, while there's nothing as irresistibly catchy as "Under Rug Swept"'s magnificent "Hands Clean", the overall impression, musically speaking, is one of freshness, optimism and energy. But better still, it's smart, and sussed, and frequently funny as hell.
