Morissette has placebo effect

Under Rug Swept\nAlanis Morissette\nMaverick Records\nPaula Cole found God with the release of Amen, the follow-up to the potent This Fire, and her biting flames shrank to a steady simmer. With Under Rug Swept, Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill has smoothed into a coated caplet. No, unlike her fellow singer/songwriter, Morissette hasn't found God (she's already played her in Kevin Smith's "Dogma"). With this album, she kneels at the altar of self-help.\nLike Jagged Little Pill, Under Rug Swept is introspective and often about relationships. But, with Under Rug Swept, Morissette looks deep inside herself to find insipid cliche. She sings, "I gave you the power to make me feel" and "I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful," and she asks "What are you, my dad?" Her "support, acceptance, encouragement, understanding and empathy" raise suspicion that Morissette engages in the ritual of many American women: afternoons watching Oprah and Dr. Phil.\nWorse yet, the self-help cliches are vague and bland because they aren't offset by details grounded in the real world. Morissette sends her listeners floating into abstraction and leaves them craving a "slap" from Jagged Little Pill's "splintered ruler." Lack of specificity also makes the cliches more apparent, and the subjects of Morissette's songs become too general. "Narcissus" is little more than her interaction with a stereotypically self-centered man.\nFortunately, the music is stronger and more varied than the lyrics and compensates for them to a certain extent. Producing for the first time, Morissette has blended sounds within her songs well. She sets guitars with effects at an appropriate level in the mix to add texture and not to overwhelm. She has also varied the album sonically from song to song. It ranges from "Flinch," a six-minute acoustic ballad that is three minutes too long to "A Man," an edgy rock track sung empathetically from a man's point of view -- Morissette's first truly ironic song. "Hands Clean" is notable for its melody. The spacious piano-and-vocal "That Particular Time" could have been on Sarah McLachlan's Surfacing.\nThough the music is well-crafted, Under Rug Swept is a contextually and lyrically dilluted version of Jagged Little Pill. It is disappointing that Morissette's focus on self-help partially numbs the impact of the music.\n

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