I’ve mostly broken my bad habit of buying albums for purely historical interest or completionism. Mostly.
Disc 1518 is…. Alanis
Artist: Alanis Morrisette
Year of Release: 1991
What’s up with the Cover? Alanis’ Giant Head. It looks like she’s holding her head up with one arm or maybe she’s voguing, as was the fashion at the time.
How I Came To Know It: I knew a single off this album from seeing the videos on MuchMusic but never considered buying the record. However, last month local record store Lyle’s was going out of business and had a 50% off sale. This record is hard to find, and I decided to buy it on a whim for…purely historical interest.
How It Stacks Up: I have two Alanis Morrisette albums. Of the two, this one is a distant second.
Ratings: 1 star
Let’s not mince words; this is not a good record. And while honour compels me to explain just why I think this, I do not plan to be excessively cruel on this review. Instead, I’ll start by noting that Alanis Morrisette was 16 years old when she recorded it. When I was 16 my biggest claim to fame was winning a high school trophy for best drama student. While I was doing that, Alanis was winning a Juno and selling 100,000+ copies of her debut record. While I don’t usually go in for biographical context, I think that bears saying.
OK, back to the ‘honour compels me’ part of the experience. This record is painful on multiple fronts. Let’s start with this genre, which I think is late eighties/early nineties dance pop. This form of music doesn’t lend itself to excellence to begin with, and here I found it unfavourably reminiscent of bad Paula Abdul (i.e. all of it) or most backing tracks played at fashion shows. Put simply, this is not my jam.
For one thing, the production of this era is atrocious, and this album is a poster child for the problems typical of the age. The drum machine is artificial, but not in that vibrant and urgent way that New Wave manages. It just feels cheap, and emotionless, like it was produced on a Casio in someone’s basement. And like an old dog won’t hunt, the thin bass won’t thump. The whole thing feels tinny.
There are some passable melodies buried in here, but they are buried deep. It is too bad because just going full pop would’ve helped, but with all the excess dance-track stuff going on, everything gets lost in a jumble. There are horns, strange synth sounds and on “Walk Away” a sample of some guy saying, “we gonna do a song that you never heard before.” After my first listen, I kept desperately hoping it would be true.
Alanis’ vocals are good although – again – unfortunately submerged in the pea soup of an over-taxed mixing board. Her vibrato delivery that would be so compelling a few years later on “Jagged Little Pill” is here, and it maddens me, because I love that vibrato, and this record gives it short shrift. Her ability to sing heartfelt emotional content is one of her strengths as an artist, but the artificiality of this record never gives her a chance.
There is one song (“On My Own”) where the Soulless Record Execs let her get ‘natural’ but a lot of that track is her straining to sing in a smooth pop style that does her no favours. It feels like they are trying to take the dynamic brilliance of her vocals and shove it into a square hole. It just doesn’t fit. Let Alanis be Alanis, SREs!
Lyrically, I never expect a lot from dance music, but as modern bands like Confidence Man demonstrate, you can have clever lyrics without giving away anything on the “danceable” front. I don’t mind that a lot of these songs are from the perspective of a teenage girl; that’s who Alanis is at this point. I do object to strained rhymes and imagery that feels jumbled together to serve the rhyme.
This includes the hit single “Never Too Hot” which is an undeniable earworm, but just what…
“Always too hot, never too cold
You make your best shot too hot to hold
Never too young, never too old
You gotta go for gold”
…is all about, I have no idea. I’m going to go out on a limb and say “not every much”. That said, when this song came on at the club back in 1991 there is a good chance I got up and danced to it. It is cheesy as hell, but it is danceable, and decades later if you quote a line from that chorus at people, they’ll quote the next line back at you. This damned dance song may be vacuous but it gets in your head and stays there, which is the main mission of most dance music.
So kudos for that, Ms. Morissette, but you’re still just getting the one star. That and the Juno.
Best tracks: Feel Your Love, Never Too Hot
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