Alanis Morissette

Oh Alanis! Where's your anger? Where's your rage? You know, that estrogen-fueled fury that made your debut, Jagged Little Pill, so remarkably easy to enjoy? Remember, Miss Morrissette, when you were able to be assertive and strong, tossing off clever couplets without ever being viewed as a strident bitch with an overactive case of PMS? You straddled that tightrope and walked it without a net, and it was your fearlessness that we adored. We know, we know. People grow up, they harness the hate and they chill the hell out. But a moment of silence, please, for the Alanis of old.

Flavors Of Entanglement is Alanis at her most upbeat and at her happiest. The Canadian songbird has been fumbling towards ecstasy since Jagged went on to sell a bazillion copies. Her stretched syllables, quirky larynx quivering and respectful aping of Joni Mitchell's iconic vocal style are ever present Alanis trademarks throughout the album, namely on the low key, Indian-influenced, rhythmic opener "Citizen of the Planet," the unexpectedly electronic "Straitjacket" and "Moratorium" and the thudding, sexy and score-like "Versions of Violence." Flavors of Entanglement is Alanis' most percussive, drum-driven effort to date, and on "Underneath," you just can envision a barefoot Alanis with her trademark flowing brown locks swinging in the breeze, while she pounds on a bongo with her unmanicured hands while recording this song.

While Alanis has traded her grrlish angst in favor of a more grown-up, granola, citizen-of-the-world maturity, she's still playing on her albums and she is still having fun, ping pong'ing her way across musical moods, alternating between ominous, sweeping, slow and dirty tones over the course of the entire album. She does her best impression of Joni on the piano-propelled "Not As We" and "Torch," both lilting yet haunting little ballads where her voice utterly dominates as she lays her cards faces up on the table.

So if you're going through your emotional ups and downs and need a record to keep pace with your pogo-prone moods, then Flavors of Entanglement will foot the bill and keep you off the meds. After all, isn't music the best medicine, next to laughter? Alanis understands this and makes her albums accordingly. We're just a little slower in coming to terms with the fact that no one wants to be the angry grrl all the time.

— Amy Sciarretto
05.29.08

The running joke goes like this: as soon as Alanis Morissette suffered a heartbreak like she did prior to Jagged Little Pill, she would once again write lyrics as vitriolic as confessional as that 1995 breakthrough. As any tabloid follower knows -- and really, in the new millennium we all follow the tabloids whether we like it or not -- Alanis split from fiancé Ryan Reynolds after the release of 2004's So-Called Chaos, an album that floated joyously on her newfound love, so it's no great stretch to see its 2008 follow-up, Flavors of Entanglement, as its opposite, a classic breakup record. And it is, filled with songs of heartbreak, anger, and regret, along with a healthy dose of self affirmation -- or at least it seems that way, as Alanis' words are harder than ever to parse, a mangled web of garbled syntax, overheated metaphors, and mystifying verbal contortions all requiring too much effort to decode. In that sense, it's a lot like Jagged Little Pill, but musically this is far closer to the muddled mystic worldbeat of Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie, thanks in large part to her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth, best known for his productions with Björk and Madonna. Given his résumé, it should come as no great surprise that Sigsworth gives Flavors of Entanglement some adventurous textures and drum loops, even electronically altered voices on occasion, but this is no dance record; it's a claustrophobic, cluttered adult pop album underpinned by a hazy new age sensibility, best heard (if not best articulated) on "Citizen of the Planet," a thick swirling dirge which serves as an appropriate opening salvo for this dense murk, where the music is almost as impenetrable as the lyrics. Coming after the streamlined Under Rug Swept and light So-Called Chaos, this return to insularity is a bit startling yet it's welcome, both for those who find a personal connection within Alanis' accidentally cryptic confessions and those who like to listen to her ramblings with their mouths agape, as this overspills with emotional and musical dissonance, the kind that made her phenomenal success on Jagged Little Pill improbable and her slow descent into high-end liberal lifestyle music after Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie quite understandable. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide