Album review: Alanis Morissette, Havoc and Bright Lights

Alanis Morissette: Havoc And Bright Lights

Collective Sounds, £12.99

Star rating: * *

There was a time when Alanis Morissette could guarantee a hit with a scathing putdown or a quirky observational portrait or a quasi-philosophical treatise which made no sense whatsoever. But that was back when there was a certain charm to her songwriting, when her wonky  perspective at least felt as refreshing as it was irritating.

Her debut album, Jagged Little Pill, was such a huge international success that it remains the standard by which she is judged. But that was 17 years ago and her recent career has been far less stellar. Back in the 1990s, Morissette was a big fish in a small pool of female artists; now she feels like yesterday’s woman, an impression not helped by her penchant for alienating pseudo-spiritual jargon. She sees herself, for example, as a “philosopher-queen-priestess-court jester” figure, according to a recent interview. At least when Lady Gaga makes a similarly overblown remark, she is usually wearing a very interesting hat.

There have been big changes for Morissette since the release of her previous album, Flavors Of Entanglement, which found her licking her wounds after the break-off of her engagement to actor Ryan Reynolds. Since then she has settled, married a rapper and become a mum. Any concerns she might take this as a cue to write icky odes to maternity turn out to be unfounded. Havoc and Bright Lights is much worse than that.

She gets the motherhood thing out the way right at the start, courtesy of her new single Guardian, a hollow pop rocker in search of a hook on which she yodels away on a big, bland chorus about her protective instincts. According to Morissette, this one’s all about her need to connect with her inner parent and inner child. Already, it feels like this could be quite a tedious trip.

It doesn’t help that the backing and Guy Sigsworth’s production is so by-the-numbers. Every track sounds calibrated to slot comfortably into the dreaded “adult contemporary” radio bracket with no nasty surprises en route.

There is a brief burst of electro pop in the shape of Woman Down, which fancies itself as a more sophisticated feminist critique than the blaring rallying cries of Beyoncé or Madonna. Morissette aspires to go further than their empowerment jingles, but ends up throwing down a clumsy lyrical gauntlet – “calling all woman haters, we’ve lowered the bar on the behaviour that we will take” – which doesn’t actually sound that angry. There are would-be strong emotional sentiments on the album’s most obvious love song, but Til You is floaty and aimless, not rapturous, with an old-fashioned arrangement that recalls The Carpenters minus the melodic richness.

Next, she makes an unoriginal stab at a satirical caricature of a vacuous starlet hellbent on notoriety. We should probably just be grateful that Celebrity has a catchy chorus and some sense of drama but P!nk and Lily Allen have already covered this territory with merciless precision. Missing out on their playful wit, Morissette sounds more like a disapproving aunt, bemoaning the culture of plastic surgery and excessive dieting.

Morissette had her own contrasting experience of sudden fame when she was in her early 20s. She has said she is “still twitching” from the stress of the Jagged Little Pill days, a subject she expresses clunkily on Empathy – “there are so many colours that I still try to hide while I paint and there are so many tunes that I secretly sing and hate” is typical of her cumbersome lyrical flow. And she’s only getting warmed up. Spiral is a bland, breezy pop rock number in the Taylor Swift vein, which tackles similarly self-absorbed subject matter, while the introspection persists through Lens.

For a bunch of songs which were written in the first flush of motherhood, there is not much sense of anything going on outside of her own head. No wonder she is feeling suffocated by the time she gets to slick radio rocker Numb. But just when you think this might win the prize for most verbose exploration of feelings, Morissette surpasses herself with the therapy-speak on the musically sleepy Havoc, and then rounds off this self-help manual in song with Receive, which is all about making time for yourself in this crazy world of domestic responsibility.

She may have further thoughts for the day, but her vocals are so strangulated on closing track Edge Of Evolution that it is impossible to figure out the specifics of this particular thesis. There is also a fair chance that, devoid of musical stimulation, her audience will have tuned out by this point anyway.