Liz Phair, 'Liz Phair' (EMI) Released 13/10/03

With the release of her debut album 'Exile in Guyville', Liz Phair made a critical impact and a name for herself as a girl power icon.  With song titles like '**** and Run', she was probably a bit strong for the Spice Girls audience who came along a few years later.  Now on her fourth album, she has teamed up with production team du jour The Matrix, most famous for assisting Avirl Lavigne with Complicated and Sk8er Boi.

It starts off pretty well, with the chunky guitar of 'Extraordinary' and the clever 'Red Light Fever', but the Matrix influence hits firm with third track and opening single 'Why Can’t I?', which sounds uncannily like their most famous client.  Elsewhere, the presence of Michael Penn (brother of Sean and husband of Aimee Mann) is detectable in the likes of 'Take a Look'.  There is some fine alt-rock on offer as well, with 'Rock Me' bringing to mind the early 90’s indie queens like Juliana Hatfield.

If you ignore the obvious commercial nature of the production and packaging, then this is a pretty good album that does tail of quite dramatically and is about three songs too long.  Bare in mind that there are two versions of this album, and despite the press release mentioning H.W.C. as an example of her lyrical edge and sexual frankness (I’ll leave you to work out what that stands for), it doesn’t appear on the review copy which is obviously the “clean” one.