Album of the week
You oughta know that Alanis is back, hotter than an Enron shredder and twice as cutting. If there is still an audience for rock and roll with heart, Under Rug Swept will be a transgalactic smash.
Get used to the names of these songs: You'll be hearing them on the radio for the next year. The first single, "Hands Clean," is a polished mid-tempo rocker, but even better is "21 Things I Want in a Lover," a personal ad inscribed on a thunderbolt. With its chomping guitar line and drill-sergeant vocals, it's as tough and sexy as "You Oughta Know." "So Unsexy" is forlorn and moving: "How these little abandonments seem to sting so easily/ I'm 13 again, am I 13 for good?" It's the sound of every woman in rainy-day mode, and it smells like a classic.
Morissette has always had two sides, as if Sylvia Plath had lived and taken up kickboxing, and she can be Plathological here. When she isn't weeping, she's ripping, telling one boyfriend, "You'll rescue me, right?/ In the exact same way they never did."
Bottom Line: Isn't it bionic
