Whitechocolate What?

-- Bill Wyman

A Is for Adultery
The thing that's always hooked Liz Phair into my mind is her voice -- that perfect fusion of ordinary and off the beaten track, bland suburban girl and smoky-fingered around-the-block-a-few-times chick. You can see both incarnations in her dirty-blond hair and ripe blue eyes, and you can read both in her name as well -- upright, businesslike "Liz" and fluid, barroom "Phair." But mostly the two are found in the fluctuations of her voice: the high, crystalline, even keel butting against the breathy, dirty alto.

Even when she's not consistent -- and, for the record, whitechocolatespaceegg is resoundingly inconsistent -- the mysteries that Phair hints at, the alleys that she takes you down with her delivery, are inviting enough to grab her hand and follow. She could read the dictionary and make it sound like a chronicle of sexy secrets: "A" is for adultery, "B" is for back rooms, "C" is for casual sex .... In the world she's painted for her listeners over the last five years everyone leads a double life. Especially Phair, with her ponytail professing innocence while her eyebrows promise everything but. It's her ordinary exoticism that gets you, the way she's a convincing girl-next-door in a sweater set and matching skirt, at the same time flashing her bad-girl garters underneath.

It's stereotypical stuff for guys, of course -- the naughty schoolgal, the naughty French maid, et al. But Phair has always had something for the ladies as well. Besides the way she reveals a dual nature every woman can recognize, Phair fulfills that primal urge to see grrrls make it as self-created auteurs -- having sprung full-grown from her home-taping studio/bedroom blaring about being a blow job queen, without anyone even asking.

She's always had her own sound, which whitechocolatespaceegg elaborates. It's the sound of sun-kissed suburbia seen through the eyes of a woman whose mind is so hopped-up her view is kaleidoscopelike, splitting her placid world into hundreds of intricate dramas. As if scanning the landscape from her front step, Phair reads her neighbors thoughts like ad copy. "I'm a big tall man/ I cut the grass/ My left eye hurts/ I can be a complicated communicator," she sings on "Big Tall Man" before crashing into a classic Freedom Rock tumble of big guitars and tough drums, a wide-open riff that embraces all of America's promises, broken and kept. Phair wants you to know that everyone has an epic inner narrative, a story that's as conflicted and libidinous as hers. The only meaningful difference between her and them, her and you, is that she has a voice that can tell those stories, and act all the many parts that each one of us writes in our little daily plays.

-- Natasha Stovall

Girlie Action
From Sleater-Kinney to the Lilith Fair, the four years since Liz Phair's Whip-Smart have seen plenty of positive girlie action. But while the burst of acclaimed girl-rock that followed her 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville, continues, a new pop-culture backlash is in progress. The most recently heralded media examples of huggable feminine truth come in the form of retrogressive pap like Ally McBeal -- whose Keane-eyed heroine whines, "I want to change the world, I just want to get married first" -- and the book Bridget Jones' Diary, wherein an obsessive British woman records her daily thigh circumference and calorie intake while yearning for a husband.

It's no wonder that Liz Phair's third album has some people worried. Any release postponed more than once, as whitechocolatespaceegg was, brings up concerns about quality, but actually that's the least of it. Unfairly or not, a sucky new album from Phair would let down all the girls who made her into their imaginary locker-room confidante on the strength of her records' sexually frank, assertively unpolished material. A sucky album might suggest that the songwriter, whose long hiatus involved an expedition into marriage and motherhood, is another casualty of McBealism.

But Phair never claimed that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. The songs on Exile and 1994's Whip-Smart limned both aggressive independence and -- without apology -- a desire for needy domesticity. Phair became kind of a rock 'n' roll version of the Phoebe Cates character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, who yearned for gauzy storybook romance while demonstrating the art of giving head on a carrot. It all perhaps reached its apogee with Whip-Smart's title song, which found Phair turning her vision of motherhood into an indie nursery rhyme. When she sang "I'm gonna lock my son up in a tower 'til/ I write my whole life story on the back of his big brown eyes," she portrayed herself as a reckless, possessive, and fiercely loving potential mom.

The funny thing is, Phair's new record ducks the issue; her car-seat consciousness barely registers in the context of whitechocolatespaceegg. There are no tunes about the joy of foisting new life upon the world here -- the one song that even mentions her husband and son does so in the course of describing the awkward, grueling reality of a changed life.