Send "Liz Phair " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Sometime over the Fourth of July weekend, Liz Phair's site announced the digital availability of her sixth album, which nobody knew was coming. The track streaming at her site, "Bollywood", is bhangra-rap about how she ended up doing TV scores out of broke desperation, featuring a bunch of "funny" pitch-altered voices imitating music-biz gladhanders ripping her off. It's one of Funstyle's four key tracks, all in a similar prefab-beats-and-wacky-voices vein; another is "U Hate It", a patchwork thing (with fake Prince harmonies) about how much everybody's going to think her record sucks, unless it's a hit, in which case they'll pretend they all loved her in the first place and her success was their doing. Its refrain goes, "I think I'm a genius/ You're being a peni-us... colada, that is."Two things are immediately evident about those four songs. One is that they're horrible on just about every conceivable level, and there's no way Phair can't know it (psst: "U Hate It"!). The other is that they are not the particular flavors of horrible anybody would ever have guessed Phair would perpetrate. The sub-Jewel alt-country move? Sure. The pro forma kid-music album? It's plausible. Suppressing her unique songwriting gifts to sound like a lesser Sheryl Crow clone? She's kind of done that already. But this? This is Phair razing her image to the ground: spitting at anyone who thinks they know who "Liz Phair" is, or expects her to make Guyville VI: The Return of the Exile. The only comparable album that comes to mind is Bob Dylan's 1970 double-middle-finger double-LP Self Portrait, on which he successfully alienated the audience that had been paying too much attention to him. Naturally, the immediate reaction to Funstyle was "What is this shit?" That was, of course, followed by a wave of contrarianism: admirers of Phair's early records arguing that actually it's pretty okay, that it's raw and eccentric and personal in a way her albums haven't been since the 1990s, that there are some decent songs on it. And it's true--what Funstyle lacks in fuck-all-y'all formal purity it possesses in the flickers of songcraft she can't shake. It's hard to avoid scavenging it for salvageable bits. "You Should Know Me" is badly arranged, but it's the kind of uncertain, circling, not-quite-foursquare picking at an emotional scab she's always specialized in; "Oh, Bangladesh" never justifies its lyrical conceit or lax, doodly lead guitar, but it flatters her voice's odd contours. "And He Slayed Her" has one terrific, furious line ("I mean, what kind of kid were you when you were a kid?/ What kind of man would do what you did?"--it's the conversational sputter of "I mean" that makes it), marooned in a lyric that rhymes "crooked soul" with, all together now, "rock'n'roll."...full text |
| Popdose |
| The news spread across my Twitter feed late yesterday afternoon like a pixelated wildfire: 1) Liz Phair had a new single out; 2) It was fucking horrible. These things are true. Liz Phair does apparently have a new “single” out, a freebie cut from an Internet-only album she’s selling from her website entitled Funstyle; and that single, “Bollywood,” is fucking horrible. The rest of Funstyle does not go as quietly into the good night; it’s not the wholesale career suicide that “Bollywood” seems to indicate. There are moments that finally fit into the context of Liz Phair’s career; I say “finally” because I personally have a hard time fitting her last record, Somebody’s Miracle, into that same context, so it almost feels to me like she’s been “gone” since her self-titled controversy magnet of 2003. (Which I’ve written about before, so I won’t get into it again, but if you dismiss that record as “Liz Phair trying to be Avril Lavigne,” you are absolutely missing out, and you need to listen closely to it again without whatever baggage you bring to it based on its production style and how it fits into the pop music landscape of its time. It’s a rocking, thoughtful, sly and revelatory pop record by a thirtysomething divorced mother completely in command of her creative and musical powers.) The problem is that the good stuff on Funstyle does not fit comfortably with the weird shitty stuff, except in the possible sense that they all at least attempt what Liz Phair has always been so good at–marrying her interior life with universal truths, and universal truths back to her interior life, in a way that’s both confessional and relatable at the same time. The shitty stuff is so distracting from the good stuff that my first impulse is to just write about why the shitty stuff is shitty, and more importantly, what she could have done to avoid the shitty stuff in the first place…or at least, what could have been done to avoid the shitty stuff being the only thing people seem to want to write about. Which presumes that was not her intent, and maybe it was; maybe the headline on the exceptional piece by Seth Colter Walls and Maura Johnston for the Awl is correct, and she’s really saying, “Look, Internet — I’ve set myself on fire.” But what needs to be said, and what you should take away if you care about Liz Phair and are interested in her art, is that there’s a really awesome EP hidden within Funstyle. In terms of sound, it’s kind of a combo platter of all her records to date–some loose rock in the mold of her first two records, some gentle guitar pop a la Whitechocolatespaceegg, and even a few bits that sound like leftovers from the self-titled record and its disappointing follow-up. These are strong songs, mostly relationship tunes, that are about the realities of confronting love, not in a spongy greeting-card sense but in an “Oh shit, I love you, now what” sense. Her narrators (and as always, the listener seems meant to wonder how much of these narrators are Phair herself, and how much is creative fabrication) have to come to terms with how they feel and what it means to their lives. Inevitably, they choose the comfort of companionship in spite of the pain–on “Miss September,” Phair sings, “and I’ll lay with your prize inside me/keep it calm, keep it safe/until you awake.” It’s a gentle moment, but infused with sex; classic Liz Phair, open and true and sincere, and tuneful and hooky....full text |
| Latimesblogs |
| OMG LIZ PHAIR POSTED A NEW ALBUM ON HER WEBSITE. I heard it's terrible. You can download it for $5.99. It's terrible, It's all over Twitter and you should read the comments on Jezebel! I hear she raps on the song that's streaming on her website. It's her first new album in five years. Yeah, that "Bollywood" song definitely grates a bit on first listen -- is she making fun of M.I.A.? (Or maybe she's sending the younger critical it-girl a warning about what happens after you've been branded a sell-out,) But that's just one track. The album has 11. I'm sure it's terrible. I hate Liz Phair! She made me fall in love with her when I was a kid, and then she turned out to be nothing like what I wanted her to be! Hey, somebody on the Internet said the best line is about her throwing up and the second best one rhyme's "genius" with "peen-yus." She is SO dumb. I think I'll go take a walk and listen to it. Tell me how it is. It's going to be terrible. Sigh...... Hating Liz Phair is fun, almost as fun as turning the pop-fashion tide away from M.I.A. by doubting her motives behind having a child with a wealthy man, or dissecting the ways Sarah McLachlan was stupid in her attempts to revive the Lilith Fair. This rough summer for feminist pop musicians doesn't strictly reflect sexism; often, women are the most vocal in expressing wrath toward role models who suddenly seem all too human. For Phair, who enjoyed a modest revival when ATO Records reissued her groundbreaking debut album, "Exile in Guyville," in 2008, being the object of others' effervescent scorn has become old hat: every album she made after that one sent more of her fans into attack mode. The fact she called this new one "Funstyle" -- as well as some of the music included in the package -- indicates that she now means to make this hating game her own. It's a little sad that Phair has grown so defensive that she's included not one, but three joke songs in which she depicts herself as exactly the kind of desperate would-be Hollywood A-lister her former devotees fear she's become. (There's a fourth that makes fun of self-help gurus and the Starbucks-haunting moms who love them.) Dan Weiss at the Village Voice music blog mentions Frank Zappa in reference to these cuts, and he's right, though I hear more Laurie Anderson: the voice manipulation, the self-parodic white-girl funkiness, and, most of all, the lovingly self-mocking superego that floats over all of it suggests that Phair, like Anderson, knows she's part of the very systems she mocks. I thought of another longtime master of satire while listening to Phair's funny stuff: Dr. Demento, the great radio clown who recently ended his long run on the airwaves. Her broad, homemade humor attains a kind of warmth that counteracts the bitterness beneath it.Her earthiness, always one of her best qualities, shines through on these tracks. Yes, they're unexpected, but they're totally accessible. Elsewhere on "Funstyle," Phair sends more confusing mixed signals, in material that intrigues on a cut-by-cut basis but doesn't quite hang together as a complete work. "You Should Know Me" seems like a Grade-B corny love song -- until the second listen, when it becomes clear that Phair's telling her paramour that she just can't fulfill those cliches. "My, My" is a glammy disco track that the Scissor Sisters should cover, but its lyrics veer toward the banal. The sonically intriguing, George Harrison-like "Oh, Bangladesh" runs on an extended metaphor that never fully comes to fruition....full text |
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