Liz Phair / Whitechocalatespaceegg by Scotch Matador Records, Inc. It's been a short while since Liz Phair semi-famously characterized Madonna as the speedboat and all subsequent female musical artists as the Go-Go's on waterskis, but it's well-documented that Liz has had her own self-produced wake to ski through for the past few years: matrimony, motherhood, and measuring up to her own tall reputation. So there exists a certain amount of strictly visual irony in the fact that the Liz staring darkly out from the cover of Whitechocolatespaceegg herself eerily resembles a Like A Prayer-era Madonna, minus the beauty-mole and sprayteased coiffure, although perhaps it's just the light. Material Grrrl or not, when it comes time for Liz to actually express herself, one of her most effective and vexing skills is to mask herself and assume some kind of character role. You're never quite sure where she's coming from, whether you should be cheering her on or crinkling your brow in confusion, and it's this device that allows her to lyrically explore all kinds of emotional territory without coming across as melodramatically confessional, scattershot, or just a novelty. Inconsistency is one thing; ambiguity is another. What's so strangely endearing about Whitechocolatespaceegg is that it's so quietly sad. It's not as angry or as indignant or as profane as those other songs of Liz's oeuvre. Yet this is not a Liz gone soft: the trademark irony, bitter humor, and sardonic wit aren't gone from the songs either. Nevertheless, most of the new songs either directly involve loss or regret of some kind -- at least in greater degrees than Liz's previous songs -- or Liz assumes the voice of a character so screwed-up or blind to his situation that the tragedy consists of his just being himself. And Liz covers a lot of ground. She adds another Johnny to the list as she sings of a wide-eyed girl's nearly masochistic love in "Johnny Feelgood"; she recounts an infuriating, guilt-ridden chat about her love life with her mother in "What Makes You Happy"; she addresses the cynical-but-true reality of modern success in "Shitloads of Money" ("It's nice to be liked / But it's better by far to get paid"); and she describes a strained relationship with aching eloquence in the disconsolate "Go On Ahead." Within the songs, things get complex. The sixth song, entitled "Love is Nothing," ends up seeming a bit misleadingly misleading: instead of being some kind of angst-ridden ode to the ineffectuality of love, like it's literally nothing, as the title sort of suggests, the refrain actually goes, "Love is nothing, nothing, nothing / Like they say ...," which can be read so many ways that the song ends up bouncing you like a basketball, with poignant lyrics that can't make up their respective minds whether they're supposed to be sunny or shady -- and with good reason, since the subject matter is similarly ambivalent. This is the overall tone of the album: uncertainty and conflict and disappointment, with a kind of troubling, unconvincing appearance of hard-edged coolness trying to cover it all up. Even the album's final song, the simple "Girls' Room," played by just Liz and her lonely chorused guitar, possesses its own subtle plaintiveness: it's a languid piece celebrating the haughty standings of a few adolescent popular girls, with their affluent social circle, their gently backstabbing whisperings, and their similar-sounding WASPy names -- Tiffany, Terry, Tricia, Tauren, Tracey -- all of which Liz sings about in the low, cool, wavery voice of a happily jaded girl demurely proud to belong to such a clique. It's a very funny song, but there's an uneasiness to it, in light of the fickle cruelty and fragility of the so-called friendships of that difficult age. The best song on the record is "Uncle Alvarez," and Liz's voice has never sounded better than it does on this one, in her expressive high range, and her band's playing alternates expertly between lush and spare. The song itself is a sad, sweet paean to the uncomfortable memory of the eponymous family member whose picture hangs in the hallway, avoided in familial conversation, a reminder of a sadly empty life full of artifice and idleness: "We feel sorry for the wall," sings Liz. Speaking of eponymous, half of Whitechocolatespaceegg's songs are produced by Scott Litt, and where there's Scott Litt, can R.E.M. be far behind. Buck, Berry, and Mills cameo instrumentally in Liz's acoustic backup band on "Fantasize," accompanying her soaring, haunting vocal melody; and while the song's 1:55 brevity and its conspicuous Stipelessness might prove aneurysmal to R.E.M. fans desiring more, the guest appearances are admirably understated, complementing Liz rather than upstaging her. Indeed, let's not gloss over the music on Whitechocolatespaceegg, especially since it's some of the best music Liz has ever written. The much-touted full-band instrumentation featured all over the record doesn't seem like a departure as much as it seems like an expansion, adding further dynamics and depth to an album already rich in lyrical profundity and songwriting skill. Granted, on the songs Litt produces, he has the tendency to overproduce, drenching her voice and guitar with too much reverb and tossing in kitschy synth lines, but overall there still exists much of the unpolished, low-fi, shoestring-budget sound that's so vital to Liz's sharp, down-to-earth demeanor. "I can be a complicated communicator," insists a totally deadpan and masculine-sounding Liz, in "Big Tall Man," a snickering character study in lunkheaded male machismo. While the vagaries of letting the moron be the mouthpiece do not go unnoticed by this reviewer, there's a very brash and apropos fairness to this anti-Liz saying such a thing, what with it being spoken by Liz herself. But she's certainly no stranger to striking a pose: she of all people knows that there's indeed nothing to it.

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