Liz Phair’s new album, Whip-Smart, due out sometime in September, is an awesome pop consolidation for the Wicker Park songwriter. The paradigm for today’s brash, acclaimed genius of the year is to go out hunting for new territory to invade when all is not yet firmed up on the home front. People like Terence Trent D’Arby and Sinead O’Connor, for instance, record one well-received album and then descend into a morass of charity shows, unsuccessful reaches, and lots of artistic angst before burping up a concept record after three or four years. Phair, by contrast, seemed to feel that her most pressing need was to write more killer songs. Whip-Smart lacks Exile in Guyville’s audacious contextualization, its epic sprawl, its nerviness and scope. But it has other things. Higher highs for one–songs like “Super Nova,” “Support System,” “Whip-Smart,” and “May Queen” are head-snapping compositions of pop subversiveness. Lower lows, too: I’m not sure what “Crater Lake,” “Nashville,” and “Alice Springs” are supposed to be about, and the song settings aren’t interesting enough to make you care. But the debut’s obsessive rock ‘n’ roll kaleidoscope–baroque improvisations on, as Phair put it, “me, my guitar, and a feel”–carries over, as does her giddily protean voice, confrontational intellectualisms, and nonpareil musicality.
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And you fuck like a volcano
My thinking for me till I come to
The album displays this or that production coup–the chirpy tracks underlying “Whip-Smart,” the mad, whistled chorus and zany synthesizers on “Support System,” the gorgeous sonic setting for the rising chords that begin “May Queen”–but retains the laconically recorded guitar tracks and low-budget charm that Wood gave her first album. Though the album has striking commercial potential, Phair most definitely hasn’t broken any new ground. But she has made a record almost as good as Exile in Guyville, and no one else I can think of has done that recently.
