Alanis Morissette: "Sup- posed Former Infatuation Junkie" (Maverick/Reprise)
If you thought Jagged Little Pill was hard to swallow, wait till you wade into these 17 anthems of alienation from the Canadian queen of complaint-rock. Trying to follow up the biggest-selling debut album of all time would drive the most well-adjusted star round the bend, but Morissette has eschewed the designer-angst option and delved into even darker and murkier emotional depths, smothering the listener with a pillow of distorted guitars, grinding beats and pained vocals. The woman who spawned a multitude of shrieking copycats is not about to rest on her therapeutic laurels. Taking Joni Mitchell as a talisman, and using hard rock as a whip, Morissette deals out some hard, uncompromising medicine, and sometimes not even a tune is allowed to get in the way of raw, unadulterated feeling and eloquent suffering.
Songs such as Sympathetic Character, The Couch and Would Not Come are heavy on the accusatory lyrics, with Morissette coming on like the world's biggest psychochondriac, i.e. someone who thinks she has every neurosis, phobia, anxiety and compulsion known to modern science. It's a tough album to get through in one sitting, especially if you find Morissette's voice to be one of rock's more effective instruments of torture, but fans of her breathy, banshee wail will find plenty to nod sagely at in the sharply-observed personal politics of Are You Still Mad and That I Would Be Good, and the homespun healing of One and Heart Of The House.