Under Rug Swept - Alanis Morissette

Like it or not, Alanis Morissette songs are all about the use (and sometimes abuse) of language. She’s wordy to a fault, but then so are Bob, Patti and Chuck D. The trouble starts when her need for self-expression capsizes the basic thrust of a good pop tune; the elegance of simplicity, the lyric in service of the song rather than the converse.

Under Rug Swept starts promisingly with the toothy guitar hook of ‘21 Things’, but it isn’t long before the groove fractures under a shopping list of Alanis’ requirements in a lover, a bunch of cumbersome lines that probably scan better than they sound.

Morissette has a fine voice and sharp melodic instincts, but these are too often complicated by the urge to communicate every last line in her notebooks. And truth be told, there’s more poetry in the first two lines of ‘Blueberry Hill’ than the Indigo Girls’ entire oeuvre.

But it’s more than the substance that keeps this listener from loving Under Rug Swept; it’s the tone. The record co-opts every Oprah buzzword to infect the American language over the last decade. Welcome back the New Puritanism – this is a record about Healing and Empowerment and Self-Forgiveness and all those other phrases so beloved of emotional hypochondriacs. It’s a record that sings of Wisdom as if it were something ordered in a catalogue rather than a degree of awareness of one’s own stupidity.

Under Rug Swept reeks so much of correctness it makes one want to do something terminally wrong. It is the product of the second Me Generation, a record about the self as obsession rather than as specimen. When Ms Morissette does write from a third party perspective (as on the single ‘Hands Clean’), who does her character choose to sing about? Alanis. Although, when she delivers the O’Connor-ish chorus to ‘So Unsexy’ (“I feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful . . . I can feel so boring for someone so interesting”), I’m caught between gobsmacked admiration and gooseflesh embarrassment.

It’s not a terrible album. In fact, the arrangements and playing are as tough and tight as the sentiments are flaky and rambling, and as I say, she could wring a melody out of a stone.

But overall, it’s a struggle to get past this album’s I’m-okay/you’re-okay-and-even-if-we’re-not-okay-that’s-okay-too wholesomeness. Under Rug Swept leaves this listener craving a little sarcasm, a little senseless negativity, anything to dirty up the all-prevailing air of prim ‘n’ proper.