Liz Phair
Whip-Smart

    Liz Phair's fame has always been tied to her excellent debut "Exile In Guyville," which elevated her to the status of a champion of female indie-rock and strictly low-fidelity music (although it's clear, starting from this album, that Liz Phair never deliberately pursued the false myth of lo-fi). However, her next two albums have frequently been overlooked and underrated, despite many good insights. This "Whip-Smart" was the most dangerous step, as it was a direct follow-up to her highly praised debut. It is certainly less provocative, less original, and less candid; Liz Phair no longer talks as freely about sex (although she doesn't stop talking about it), and the songs describe more stable and less turbulent relationships compared to those narrated in the small confessionals of the previous album.

    Already the opening is less spectacular: "Chopsticks," two minutes of ethereal piano, is not as engaging as a "6'1"." Yet, Phair still manages to capture the listener's attention with a curious plot and her first gratuitous "fuck": "He said he liked to do it backwards. I said that's just fine with me. That way we can fuck and watch TV." It's in a text like this that Liz Phair's spirit fully emerges in all its bluntness and irony, probably the true keys to her charm.

    But if "Chopsticks" surprises the listener, they can only be even more bewildered when immediately after they are face-to-face with the volcanic "Supernova," a good attempt to strike a perfect hit single in still unsuspecting times. The track is exquisitely catchy and highlighted by the lyrics, which are anything but conventional for a love song. Even in "Support System," Liz Phair plays in more pop domains, introducing a whistled chorus that is probably courtesy of XTC but works perfectly in its context.
To purists, two tracks like these - although both refreshingly examples of perfectly balanced pop between indie and mainstream - might cause some to wrinkle their noses. However, when Liz Phair leans more towards her debut, she does even better: "Nashville" is a not too distant cousin of "Gunshy" or "Explain It To Me" from "Exile In Guyville": a distorted acoustic piece with a psychedelic and dreamy undertone. But also the cryptic "Shane," chilling especially in the closing with a haunting "You gotta have fear in your heart" that repeats cyclically like a solemn warning. The melancholic "Go West" is a piece that, if there were any remaining doubts, dispels them about Liz Phair's vocal versatility, contrasting once again, as in the famous "Flower," her sublime contralto with a celestial falsetto.

    Unfortunately, in the second half, the album, while keeping at a good level, doesn't manage to hit in the same way except in the frenetic "Jelaousy" and the unexpected chant of the title-track (where Phair describes an ideal future child of hers, leading to a fun refrain, a conscious nod to Malcolm McLaren's "Double-Dutch"). The raw, building rock of "May Queen" is the most fitting closing track in the songwriter's entire discography.

   "Whip-Smart" comes across as a pleasant transitional album between "Exile In Guyville" and the shift of "Whitechocolatespaceegg," more digestible and less amateur than its predecessor but still far from being a mere mass-produced album (any reference to the 2003 self-titled is not coincidental). And even if it doesn't always completely convince, records like this are not so easily found anymore.