Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


 
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 

Liz Phair
Return to Guyville?

Somebody’s Miracle, which has already been mixed, sequenced, and mastered, may not be due till the first week of October, but that didn’t keep Liz Phair from making a major-market acoustic promotional tour of relatively intimate venues. The rows of chairs that lined the Paradise’s usually open dance floor for her two-night stand a week ago Tuesday and Wednesday set an oddly formal or at least adult tone that the once and perhaps future queen of the indie underground undermined by arriving at the Tuesday show shoeless in a skirt that revealed more of her legs than she may have intended. Then again, Phair’s no idiot. She joked about the, uh, wardrobe malfunction that allowed anyone sitting up front to see up her skirt, demonstrated how her futuristic electric-acoustic guitar provided ample support for her right breast, and generally charmed the pants off the capacity crowd with loose banter and a free-ranging set peppered with tunes from her 1993 Matador debut, Exile in Guyville, a disc that belongs near the top of any respectable list of groundbreaking ’90s albums. Once she knew the crowd was on her side, she even offered a choice of two tunes from the lo-fi dorm-room four-track Girlie recordings she made as a student at Oberlin: "Wild Thing" won.

Phair didn’t omit "Why Can’t I" or "Extraordinary," two of the more objectionable tunes from the controversial stab at mainstream success that characterized her 2003 Liz Phair, a Matrix-polished modern-rock production that recast her as a dolled-up teen-pop Top 40 product. But in an acoustic setting, they didn’t sound all that out of place next to Phair standards like "Supernova" and "Five Foot One." And the few new tunes she unveiled — particularly the buoyant, confessional "Somebody’s Miracle" — seemed designed, like the tour itself, to reassure old fans that she’s back on the road to Guyville. It wasn’t quite a concession or an apology. But as she winked at an admiring fan in the front row, Phair seemed relieved to be embraced once again as an exile among friends.

By Matt Ashare

Issue Date: August 5 - 11, 2005
Back to the Music table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group