Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 25/07/05
Label: Maverick

Given that Alanis Morrissette has spent the last decade systematically dismantling any possible affection for her or her work, it's surprising to remember that her breakthrough record, "Jagged Little Pill", was actually a powerful - if flawed - record. It may have drowned in hideously self-conscious therapy-speak, and the hard guitars may have felt bolted on to conventional songwriting, but when it worked well it was exciting and fresh. It also gave us pop's greatest parlour game, with spot the genuine irony in "Ironic" (we go for the ten thousand spoons line).

Unfortunately its vast and peculiar success - 30 million records sold, effortlessly outstripping anything by, say, Radiohead - only encouraged Morrissette's pretension and the rest of her career has been like listening in on the interior monologue of a deeply boring and repetitive madwoman. If Morrissette was hoping to win back our respect with this acoustic version of her big hit - an artistic move which makes Gus van Sant's frame-by-frame remake of "Pscyho" look inspired - she was sorely mistaken. Stripped of the rough guitars and eclectic production of the original, two things are exposed - those words and that voice. Neither fare well.

It's the big hits which suffer most. "Hand In My Pocket" had a certain low-key charm first time around, but stripped to its bones it sounds like a stream of witless marketing slogans - "I'm free but I'm focused, I'm green but I'm wise". Much worse is the vicious murder of her one masterpiece, "You Oughta Know". Originally a raw and genuinely frightening scream of pain, as well as a rare example of Morrissette writing direct and simple lyrics, it is here given a gruesome strum-along makeover which obscures its anger and wouldn't sound out of place on a KT Tunstall record. As for "Head Over Feet" - well, some things are simply too painful to discuss.

It's not all quite as bad as that. Whatever the idiocies of the lyrics, "Ironic" has always been a pretty and catchy song, and it actually sounds more relaxed and engaging without the hoary loud guitars of the original. And both "Perfect" and "Forgiven" survive the blandification intact, probably because they were so close to acoustic in the first place. But these are small moments of reprieve in what is overall one of the most infuriating and pointless records to have ever been released. How fitting that it was first sold through Starbucks, that other great symbol of watered down culture and unwarranted success.

    by Jaime Gill