Whitechocolate What?

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.

What whitechocolatespaceegg does have is all the anxiety and lust of the past albums, all the rogues and Johnnys and philosophical drinking buddies; and with an even more whirly-freaky prog-rock production aesthetic than Whip-Smart, it might be the most enjoyable assemblage yet of Phair's toes-out-a-car-window pop and her cozy, sarcastic lo-fi intimacies. Despite voice lessons, Phair is still approachably nasal and likely to croak out of her vocal range, and she joins off-center hooks and fluid structures to create iridescent songs like "Headache" and "Love Is Nothing." Phair's shooting-the-shit lyrics make the more oblique ruminations of other pop songwriters seem like so many poodles in frilly dresses; while "Perfect World" and "Girls' Room" are the most delicate and baldly sweet songs she's ever recorded, their language of wistfulness and longing ("I wanna be cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious," she sings on "Perfect World") remains steadfastly unadorned.

If whitechocolatespaceegg lacks anything, it's the I/me perspective that on previous albums let listeners believe every Phair song was a page from her diary. While Exile was a smart-mouthed response to not just the Rolling Stones but a whole world of sneering dude-rock, and Whip-Smart was the sound of a woman conscious that her music was being held up to the light and checked for spots and holes, much of whitechocolatespaceegg bears evidence that Phair is trying to take herself out of the whole equation. She's still singing in the first person, but this time she does it while slipping into the skin of one character after another -- the giddy, sensitive-macho "Big Tall Man" (he cuts the grass and drag races, but also reminds us that "I can be a complicated communicator"), the train-sex enthusiast of "Baby Got Going," the Holden Caulfield-esque loser who narrates the sprawling "Only Son" -- Phair's answer to "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Nobody can fault Phair for not making another Exile in Guyville, and if anxious girls and sweaty boys never fixate on another lyric of hers the way they did on that notorious "blow job queen" line, so much the better. Now that she's back to join the XX musical party that's grown larger, more lucrative, and more art-directed than ever in her absence, she's got more than potty-mouthed swagger to bring along. And if Ally McBeal keeps going strong, we'll need it.

-- Andi Zeisler

Mom Power
Marriage, family, and love -- the institutions that most Americans equate with success and happiness -- can wreck an artist. Name the last great album or film or novel created by a comfortable, content person. The emotionally wasted Bob Dylan of Blood on the Tracks wipes away his late-'70s Christian stuff. The Replacements' drunken wails eviscerate frontman Paul Westerberg's sober solo material. It's no contest.

Once, Liz Phair was anything but content. The gloriously bitchy singer/songwriter psychologically -- and incisively -- castrated men on her debut, Exile in Guyville, and, to a lesser extent, on its follow-up, Whip-Smart. (She went after women and herself with equal venom.) Soon after, however, Phair found love, got hitched, and had a kid; all healthy moves, but ones that left the cynical bastards who liked her questioning the persona that emerged on her first two records. Rumors of creative constipation caused even more consternation as Phair burned through several producers during the recording of whitechocolatespaceegg, her oft-delayed third album.