Liz Phair – Somebody’s Miracle — music review
Liz Phair was one of the artists I started listening to back in Junior High school. Not so much because her music was good, but rather because she was hot. In listening to her CD’s though I found her catchy alt rock sensibilities and sassy-nasty lyrics to be quite a nice compliment to my daily regimen of the Seattle sound elite: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Exile in Guyville and Whip-Smart ended up in regualr rotation in my CD collection.
Her fifth album (not counting Girlysound) and third featuring the “benefits” of voice training, Somebody’s Miracle is sort of Liz Phair lite. In the days of ‘Guyville’, Phair’s tomboy-sex-kitten persona sang in sultry monotone “I want to be your blowjob queen.” In Somebody’s Miracle, Phair has taken to soprano trills, reassuring her lover in ‘You Can Count on Me’, “With me you’ll feel protected. You’ll never be rejected.” To the old fans this can prove quite a bit jarring.
As Phair has grown older her songs have transcended the initial fascination with sex and shock value and moved on to more mature subject matter concerning love and fear of being loved. But with such a maturation also lost are the raw edginess and driving guitars of her pre-whitechocolatespaceegg songs (ie: ‘Supernova’), replaced by folksy pluckings of ‘Closer to You’ and country barfly twang of ‘Why I Lie’.
To be honest, some of these play better if you don’t listen to the lyrics. It’s not that they’re bad so much as they’re better read in Phair’s memoirs than heard in a song. For example, in ‘Leap Of Innocence’ Phair warbles “I wish it had stayed like that forever. But everyone was dropping off like flies. I had so many friends in rehab. A couple who practically died.” Set to music it’s more than a little awkward.
But that’s not to say that everything’s bad. On the whole the majority of songs are enjoyable and low key, and there are some catchy faster paced songs such as chick-flick-soundtrack-candidate ‘Lazy Dreamer’. It’s just that Somebody’s Miracle is a long long way from the old Liz I fell in love with. This is the Liz Phair that you can take home to your mother.
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