Liz Phair’s “Funstyle”

Without any warning, Liz Phair released a new album over the Fourth of July weekend, “Funstyle.” The 11-track album is available online only, via her Web site, and for a mere $5.99.

“Funstyle” was apparently a shelved false start that she decided to release online while everyone waits for the “real” album to be finished.

At least half of the tracks feature her frustration at Hollywood, labels and fans who want endless regurgitations of her debut, “Exile in Guyville.”

“Funstyle” is interesting in that it highlights both how much of the last two much-despised albums were her, and not her label (a lot of the instrumentation sounds very similar), and how much they weren’t. There’s a lot of kookiness here, for instance, which hasn’t been seen in full effect since at least “whitechocolatespaceegg.” At one point, she rhymes “genius” with “penis,” for instance (but it’s an insult, and not old school dirty talk this time around).

In fact, the whole album is very much in the vein, musically, of WCSE, although the subject matter is no longer about her dissolving marriage and her relationship with her son, but rather her career. That’s always dangerous territory, creatively: The audience for discussions and complaints about the entertainment industry is relatively small, especially for an artist who made her bones speaking about broadly understandable topics.

At other times, it sounds like she went into the studio with Cornershop, given all the references to the Indian subcontinent and the dense layering of voices and instruments on some tracks. (This works for me: I love Cornershop.)

While “Funstyle” isn’t not the best album ever, it definitely feels like we’re getting to hear her, and not what some A&R guy packaged up, and that’s a real improvement.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>