Liz Phair

In 1993 a twenty-six-year-old Liz Phair burned her image onto the post-feminist landscape
with Exile in Guyville, an album that perfectly captured the experiences of young women
stranded between puberty and adulthood. Phair herself embodied the contradictions of
contemporary chickdom: She cursed sexism while reveling in her own sexuality, acted
tough but suffered from debilitating stage fright. The five years since have been... More >

In which a girl-rock shooting star seeks recognition as nothing more but nothing less than the imaginative, eccentric singer-songwriter she always was. Her perspective remains distinctly female even when she's impersonating men. But her prim, outspoken raunch is down to a few hints, none as memorable as "Go On Ahead"'s resigned analysis of a marriage strained by the birth of a child, or "Girls' Room"'s dream of high school, or "Uncle Alvarez"'s con man hanging from the family tree. This isn't an indie babe's album, or a bl*wj*b queen's either. It's the work of an artist testing her capacity for fictional scenarios, of an upper-middle-class woman well past worrying why she f*cks and runs--in public, at least. Its spare, halting, impractical, distinct, blatantly hooked sound honors the home demo over the bar raveup because it was invented by someone who shares an indigenous habitat with record geeks--the kind of bedroom that's longer on stereo equipment than ceiling mirrors. (Grade: A)