Sometimes fate will open up and drop something really precious on you from out of the blue. Such is the case with my near-miraculous possession of Liz Phair's new album, which doesn't drop until June! AHHHH!!!!!

I'll do a full review on the off chance that anyone who reads my site even knows who Liz Phair is.

In the early 90s, Liz Phair became an indie rock legend by crafting frank and deceptively simple songs about her romantic alienation. Because she dealt directly and plainly with sexual themes, she became something of a media darling as rock’s potty-mouthed princess. And because her music was both sublimely structured and arranged and entirely unlike anything that had come before or has come since, the critical reputations of her Exile in Guyville and her Girlysounds demo bootlegs remains untouched by other singer-songwriters to this day. Her unevenly received (though no less brilliant) sophomore album, Whip-Smart, sported a mildly more rocked-oriented sound and won her a fair (no pun intended) amount of radio and MTV airplay. Then Phair disappeared from radar to marry a filmmaker and have a kid before returning in 1998 with whitechocolatespaceegg, a pared-down and mature, if somewhat distant, return to her musical roots. Now, Phair returns again with a self-titled comeback—this time without the husband but with the kid—and the axe swings the other way: Phair tries to rock-out her sound while reviving her old thematic stand-bys of confusion and sex. The results are mixed.

The first thing apparent about Phair’s new album is how little it sounds like a Liz Phair album. Its first half is dominated by generic hook-heavy rockers that would sound more at home on an Avril Lavigne album—which is no surprise, given that Liz has taken to writing songs with the Matrix these days, under the auspices of getting her radio airplay. The Matrix songs are passable and some of the hooks are admittedly infectious—particularly the ones on "Rock Me" and "Why Can’t I?"—but compared to the rest of Phair’s catalogue they sound bizarrely superficial

Which is not to say that the songs are without merit. As superficial as the songs seem, Phair’s dual trademarks of sexuality and wit pop up here and there. On "Why Can’t I?", a poppy sing-along song about first becoming involved with someone she sings "Here we go, we’re at the beginning / we haven’t fucked yet / but my head’s spinning." On "Rock Me," Phair’s ode to doing guys my age she asks, "What’s give or take nine years anyway?" before ironically lamenting "Your record collection don’t exist / you don’t even know who Liz Phair is." But ultimately these songs have little heart of their own: though "Rock Me" rocks, it feels like a retread, like the Phair classic "Flower" turned up to 11. It’s also feels uncomfortable: it’s a little bizarre to hear a 36-year old woman singing about her favorite underwear without any hint of irony. (Luckily, the irony seems to be bubbling just underneath the surface of "Hot White Cum," one of the album’s better songs.)

The center part of the album is the most interesting in that it supplies the intimacy and introspection on which Phair built her legend. On "Take A Look," she asks if we "want to know all the details of her disaster," obviously referring to the break-up of her marriage. (Indeed, from an artist like Phair, we do—it would have been a great song to open up a great album if Phair had maintained that introspective theme, since some of the best albums of all time have been studies in dissolving marriages. But, alas, Phair provides only one other track dealing with the issue: "Little Digger", a whitechocolatespaceegg-sounding song in which she sings beautifully and delicately to her young son about his emotions concerning the divorce. She pleads, "I’ve done the damage / the damage is done / I pray to God that I’m the damaged one." "Firewalker," an anthemic ballad about personal growth and the album’s true sonic stand-out, sounds so much like classic Phair I thought it was a Girlysounds-remake at first. It would have been an excellent closer to a better album. Here it just signals the end of the interesting middle section.

Ultimately, Liz Phair is her least essential album. It’s uneven and though it occasionally shows moments of promise, the promise of those moments is not fulfilled. It is confusingly contradictory: though Phair has returned to writing songs about her relationships and sex, she’s managed to do so almost entirely without the world-weary reflection that made her classic albums so personal. Given the heavy influence of the Matrix, it’s as if this is Avril Lavigne's impression of Liz Phair. Hopefully on her next album Liz Phair will know who Liz Phair is.