Twenty-five years ago, Alanis Morissette became a superstar overnight because she was awake and angry and she thought the world should know it. Now that she’s older, she seems to have reconciled some of her demons, but the coals of her anguish have been replaced by widespread anxiety and depression. Such nice forks on the way, which is his first record in eight years and ninth overall. Yes Such pretty forks it should be taken as an autobiography, she is now a middle-aged mother suffering from insomnia, acknowledging her addictions, occasionally taking acid, and, after surviving some type of nervous breakdown, has strong control over irony. Her lyrics are still sharp, and there is a lot of drama and tension at all times, but unfortunately she cris de coeur don’t translate catchy and cutting songs.
The best song here, “Reasons Why I Drink,” finds the grunge pop poster girl taking stock of how she got to her midlife crisis: she’s been “working since [she] can remember as [she] it was single digit, “and she doesn’t know how to define her limitations, and she details her addictions through a lighthearted and lighthearted piano line. None of that is particularly hummable, but you feel for her when she sings:” Nothing can give me a I breathe from this torture. “She spends much of the rest of the record in that feeling of purgatory.
In the opening number, “Smiling”, he revisits the contemplative environment of “Without invitation” to narrate his “life of extremes” and “the anatomy of [her] Shock. “But the sentiment quickly becomes a contemporary adult, and she inhabits the kind of twilight zone of soft rock against which her recordings from the 1990s seemed to rebel. And she stays in that realm for much of the rest of the record. So even though she has caustic remarks (“You see the figure skater, I’m afraid the ice is thin,” she sings “Missing the Miracle”), they are often buried in new, old, rhythmless soundscapes that have more in common. with the other music giant of the nineties, Windham Hill, that sounds that people invoke when they think of it.
Her personal revelations about “the end of the superwoman” about the sleepless rumination “Losing the plot” sound ironically sleepy. She separates a litany of ways she’s been harmed in “Reckoning,” even describing her death in the third verse, but it’s a smooth calculation with acoustic guitars and strings. And in “Ella”, she sings being on her kitchen floor, wanting to ask for help through a warm piano line. Despite all the excitement she pours into the making of her stories, her songs seem to blur together. The most interesting story on the album, the final melody, “Pedestal”, which could be dubbed as “You Oughta Know, Part Two”, as she curses a friend or ex who rose to the social ladder by dropping her name, could being too gentle to raise it. The eyebrows of the person you are stringing. For all your melancholy, Such pretty forks it feels personal but never profound.
