The kindest thing I can say about Liz Phair’s eponymous new album–her first in nearly five years–is that it’s easy to forget. Produced primarily by the Matrix, the trio of former pop musicians (including a refugee from Haircut 100) responsible for Avril Lavigne’s hits, the disc’s relentlessly radio-friendly tracks are as mundane as advertising jingles but nowhere near as memorable.
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Phair told Entertainment Weekly that she wasn’t happy with the reception Capitol execs gave the record’s first draft, which was produced by Mr. Aimee Mann, Michael Penn. “[They] were like, ‘It will be a nice record. It will be critically liked and it will be fine,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘It’s way too much work to go out and promote a record to hear only that. I’m not leaving the box until you’re more excited than that.’” Summing up her motivations, Phair recounted a conversation with collaborator Pete Yorn: “He was like, ‘Well, isn’t it just about the music?’ I looked at him and I’m like, ‘Not for me anymore. It’s not.’”
Enter the Matrix, and whatever Penn crafted appears to have disappeared down the rabbit hole. Phair’s desire to avoid the critically acclaimed route–or, as she put it in the same interview, “be[ing] Wilco”–explains her album’s dumbed-down flirtatiousness and frankly embarrassing sex-kitten fillips. Even without the dubiously sensual metaphors (“Not too dirty and not too tight / It just feels right / You’re like my favorite underwear”), Phair’s attempts to out-Britney Britney come across about as creepy as you’d expect the seduction of teenagers by a thirtysomething to seem, less Mrs. Robinson than Mrs. Roper. “Rock Me” is probably aiming for knowing irony when Phair sings “Your record collection don’t exist / You don’t even know who Liz Phair is,” but after listening to the song, whose chorus relies heavily on a repeated “Baby baby baby baby baby,” who’d want to know?
Albini, bless his contrarian heart, would have none of this, and he wrote a letter to the editor that ran under the headline “Three Pandering Sluts and Their Music Press Stooge.” As concerned as Albini was with deriding how Phair and the rest sounded, he was equally obsessed with the mechanics of their rise to fame and the economic structure of the industry that supported them. It provoked strong reactions at the time: letters responding to it appeared in the Reader for months after Wyman’s initial column, and they sketched out almost every possible permutation: pro-Albini, anti-Wyman; anti-Albini, pro-Wyman; and, a favorite, anti-Albini, anti-Wyman.
All this makes Liz Phair’s embrace of the mainstream more understandable–and the generally poor quality of the result even more tragic, because Liz Phair is awful even by mainstream standards. Of course, Phair has a pat answer for the bad reviews she’s already been getting. She’s told reporters that she expects some fans to reject her new album because, as the New York Times wrote, “the alt-rock establishment” will think “that she has sold out.”
