A pop princess in hiding

Published on Friday 21 May 2004 01:00

Avril Lavigne: Under My Skin **

ARISTA, 13.99

In the realm of the processed puppet pop star, it’s all about painting out the strings so it looks as if they are acting of their own volition. Avril Lavigne has come out well - 14 million albums well, at last count - from this procedure. While the current Britney-bashing craze is being considered for Olympic sport status, surly young Lavigne is held up as a credible alternative to the pink’n’pretty pop princesses because she wears black nail polish and has lots of guitars on her songs.

But it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Lavigne comes from similar talent show stock and has been groomed for stardom in much the same way as the beleaguered Britney but, unlike Ms Spears and her recent escapades - a string of flings with bad boys, a drunken Vegas wedding and a public breakdown - Lavigne has yet to display a shred of the rebellious spirit implicit in her marketing package. Hopefully, that might emerge round about album number three. It’s not much in evidence around album number two, however.

Under My Skin is Lavigne’s equivalent of Britney’s I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman. There are no gauche fairytale across-the-tracks teen love stories such as the bouncy hit Sk8ter Boi from her debut album Let Go, but there are plenty of Complicated-style dissections of relationships with boys - confessions of undying devotion, frustrating arguments, horrible breakups, and bags of analysis. Just like Dawson’s Creek, only with fewer syllables. While Lavigne is keen to stress her co-writing credit, and while she can really belt out a belligerent lyric, she just doesn’t have the soul or vulnerability to convince that she means a word of what she says. A young girl (okay, she’s 19, but she looks 12) singing directly to other young girls about young girl neuroses is unlikely to fail, yet this is such a hollow, boring album.

Mindful of her teenage and even pre-teen audience, Lavigne soft rocks with responsibility. Current single Don’t Tell Me is a blunt chastisement of her frisky date. "Don‘t think that your charm/And the fact that your arm is now around my neck/Will get you in my pants/I’ll have to kick your ass," she rants in a brief flash of sass. It’s a True Love Waits pledge couched in snotty cynicism.

But that’s the only ass Lavigne is kicking. The track, the entire album, actually, reeks of production-line chick rock. At times, only her eyeliner, sulky demeanour and bovver boots separate her from the latest Corrs single.

Now that she has largely dispensed with the Sk8ter Boi-style punk pop froth, Lavigne is staking out similar territory to that other Canadian angst queen, Alanis Morissette. Often, there is the same affected quirkiness in her delivery which is, at best, hackneyed and, at worst, intensely irritating.

THE OPENING two tracks, Take Me Away and Together, throw some half-hearted rock shapes, and Lavigne gives herself a sore throat yelling about the pain of something or other. It just sounds like the forced anguish trotted out by corporate goths Evanescence, and that’s not an insult to throw around lightly.

He Wasn’t fortunately doesn’t take itself so seriously and is a refreshing blast of petulant bubblegum punk about choosing the wrong boy. "This is when I start to bite my nails/And clean my room when all else fails" is about as complicated as it gets, but rather its inane rhyming couplets than any amount of chest-beating in the tedious, overwrought ballads that follow it.

Fall To Pieces and Freak Out break the monotony. The former is a mid-paced meander with as good a chorus as she has to offer about how being in love means never having to say anything, while the latter sounds like a more thoughtful Busted and outlines Lavigne’s take on primal therapy ("just freak out, let it go").

Having completed her term paper on "Teenage Relationships: Bummer, Blast Or Both?" she is allowed outside to play on the final "bonus" track. I Always Get What I Want is more fun than the rest of the album put together. Recalling the fizzy brattishness of Kelly Osbourne’s album or Pink’s punkier tracks, it appears to be a satirical sideswipe at spoiled celebrities.

Avril, though, would never act the prima donna. All she wants is to be taken seriously; all she needs is genuine attitude and decent, spunky songs.