Alanis Morissette So-Called Chaos. Release Date : May 18, 2004. Label: Maverick. Rating: Andy doesn't dig rating stuff. Alanis Morissette comes back with this 'coming of age' album or 'accepting oneself' album or whatever you want to refer to it as, with her perenially wordy lyrics. She leapt forward in her first single off the album, "Everything," by hacking off her trademark long locks in the video for all to see. Sluffing off her younger angry self with a new mature haircut. This is a kinder, gentler Alanis, from her earlier, surlier days. She still questions, but she also accepts. "Eight Easy Steps" revisits that ironic theme that became so synonymous with her some years ago, only now rather than just relaying not-actually-ironic stories to us, she tries to teach us how to be ironic and/or contradictory. How nice of her! It's amazing how she can say the same thing over and over in a song with different words and totally get away with it. If you think about what she's saying in "Out Is Through," then there's really only three lines in the whole song. It's basically broken down into when things are bad, I think of better things / and why the hell wouldn't I really? / but we have to fight through it instead. Her huge vocabulary is both her best friend and her biggest curse. How much she turns the other cheek when some guy checks out other chicks in her presence? - is this her being a strong, independant woman (how braggarty - I'm not jealous!), or is it her admitting she's a robot because she doesn't care (I don't get moved by much)? This is from "Doth I Protest Too Much" It's hard to tell exactly what she's getting at with the whole album. I guess she's just happy now. What a weird evolution she's had, if we trace all the way back to her *Alanis* days, then to her first Alanis Morissette days, and now to this. She usually doesn't feel the need to rhyme, because I guess she's totally unconventional and artistic, but when she does rhyme she goes hard. One of her characteristics is her strange syllable breaks. She tumbles through lines that have way more syllables than the meter should allow, putting the emphasis seemingly intentionally on the wrong ones. There's a sitar, but just barely. It's hardly even worth mentioning, but hey, it's in my notes. Really superfluous in the mix. There's not really another chick out there right now who sounds like her. She's not as pop-fluff, or acoustic-roots, or lite-goth, or overkill rock as seemingly every other gal in mainstream music right now. She has a blend of rough, yet sentimental, introspective rock, and her voice with it's trilling snaps and pops is definitely out there on its own. There's this weird accenty drawl she's added to some words that I've never heard before. I don't know what that's about. "Knees of My Bees?" The title track is cool. It starts out really spooky sounding, and roars into a snarly chorus. It sounds like an angry song, but it isn't. That would totally go against the grain of the whole record. Now that's ironic. Okay, it's not, it's just weird. I guess she's in love? The naked through the streets line is also a blast from the past. Remember her terribly-shocking naked-in-the-city video? Back to instruments, I think the guitars in this song need a bit of fuel. They sound cool, but they're sitting too far back, too shrouded in all the other stuff going on. "Not All Me" has definite 80's-like synth noises. So much new stuff we're seeing from Morissette on this record! I sound terribly sarcastic don't I? I don't think I can really help but be more critical of bigger releases. Part of me thinks it's because those bigger artists can take a bit more criticism, but it's more likely because people really do lose an edge when they 'make it' and have to answer to other people with every release. Indie or smaller artists have less pressure to follow some credo or sell trajillions of records, so they have all this room to be super-experimental and creative, and I just find they're generally more interesting. While Morissette here has shown some things to us that she never has before, they're strange things. Her music is fairly safe though. It's a quite rehashed record, just with a softer theme. Aside from there being a few more tralalala ballads in the pile, the music is pretty much the same formula she's always had since she decided to be a rock gal, and the lyrical presentation is definitely the same. It's a shame. I think she's a really talented and clever girl, and I'd like to see her do something a bit more interesting with her art and her gifts. "This Grudge" perhaps explains her past angry albums, and why she's toned down now. I want to be big and let go of this grudge that's grown old / all this time I've not known how to rest this bygone... etc.. She starts out saying something about how long, how many songs, how much writing has been dedicated to "This Grudge." How adult contemporary though! When artists come to terms with themselves, they start to get dull. That is such a cliché, but darn if it ain't true. The best art comes from the tortured, the depressed, the angry, the lonely, the self-deprecating, the lost souls. There's just more passion and fire. A lot of this feels like space filler, inoffensive dinner party music, racked alongside the Cher records. I mean, this is still much better than Cher, but... never mind. I can just envision Morissette though, tossing in a resounding "fuck" somewhere in the middle of a song just to prove she's still hardcore. She doesn't. Anyways, I don't doubt she's feeling everything she's written about here, but that's just it. She's basically written about mellowing out and cooling off. See? She's passionate about her mellowness, I suppose. At least we have Avril Lavigne now. Anyone notice how much of a little Morissette clone she is? Grumpy, wordy chick, same vocal inflections, same onstage movements. Creepy. Man, the meter on this record is just out the window! "Spineless" features some evil, Tea Party-esque dark strings. That's pretty out of place alongside the rest of the disc. There's not enough of them to make sense, just like that sitar we heard earlier. Oh, I spoke too soon! I can be an asshole sneaks up here, proving Morissette still can be subversive and snarky. It doesn't really come off powerfully this late in the game though. Again, ironically, this turns up in the last song on the disc, which was the first single, "Everything." Maybe she was trying to ease us into her new self. She has so many complex sides, see. So she is in love. And her lover accepts that she can be a jerk as much as a glowing and wonderful person. So the themes on this record turn out to be dichotomies, dilemmas, conflicting opposites... and mellowness. I don't know if I totally get the point, but okay. Well, I do see her merit in the grand scheme of the musical world. She really just needs to be careful not to lose her artistic side as she carries on, but this is worth a listen-through. Lyric of choice : From "Eight Easy Steps" : How to sabotage your fantasies by fears of success. Song of choice : "Excuses." No reason, I just like it more than the others. -Andy Scheffler Elsewhere Alanis Morissette website Published : August 6, 2004.