new introductory bit here.

This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.

note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input. Purple lettering indicates something nobody legally got paid for.

Based in Chicago, the perennially angry Liz Phair took up guitar while living in San Francisco in the late '80s and, after deciding she was serious about a musical career in 1991 and recording a huge number of songs for some "cassettes-for-friends" albums called Girlysounds, had a record deal with Matador just a year later. Guyville, which emerged in 1993, is a response to the male-dominated industry in general, and the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street in specific. Phair is an awesome guitarist, she's not very happy, but she's also a little long-winded. At 18 tracks, her debut album is bloated, and more than a few songs seem superfluous. It is interesting to realize that "Fuck and Run," with its tragic refrain of "I want a boyfriend..." is more vunerable than its title indicates, while "Flower," which does have a vunerable title, contains some sexual imagery so raw that you can imagine Mick Jagger curling up in fear. Liz's refusal to compromise her lyrics or her outlook slowly earned her some censored radio play and the follow-up, Whip-Smart, opens with the double punch of "Chopsticks" and "Supernova" before sliding into a constant groove of great, insightful lyrics and wonderful guitar. Her voice, on the other hand, became as much of a trademark since, frankly, it's not her strongest feature.

Phair took a few years off to marry and have a child before returning in 1998 for her most artistically successful album. whitechocolatespacegg is not as immediate as Whip-Smart, and some of its charms are not as immediately apparent, but it contains some fine material like "Johnny Feelgood" and the remarkable "Polyester Bride." The album is less angry than the earlier work, but "Uncle Alvarez" is very cute, and "What Makes You Happy," which I had wrongfully overlooked before, is possibly her best song to date.

Since the third album with the long title, Phair has continued writing songs and has contributed at least one new piece to the soundtrack of Julie Johnson. A fourth album is expected in mid-2003.

LIZ PHAIR: Secretly Timid (the girlysound recordings)
This CD collects 20 of the numerous tracks Liz recorded for her cassette-only Girlysound albums. The sound quality is decent and some of the performances are all right. Several of the more worthwhile songs were revisited for her first two proper albums. Several others weren't worth revisiting.

LIZ PHAIR: Alone With My Friends (Minneapolis 10/17/98, unlabelled)
An average audience recording from an early show in the whitechocolatespaceegg tour, featuring fantastic performances of "Big Tall Man" and "Mesmerizing." Unfortunately, she can't seem to bring off "What Makes You Happy," which is one of my favorite of her songs, live very well, so she dropped it from the set not long after this.