i feel like trashy synth music has made a huge comeback due to the economic state of our country and i’m just truly here for it. “i know a girl… and yeah she’d rock ur world. modern day joan of arc!”
Sep 19, 2024
Related Recs
my step dad recommended joan armatrading the other week so I listened to her essentials playlist on apple music and came across thsi song
it’s really good and kind of like subtly 80s
i think it’s kind of jazzy/pop/rock but don’t take my word for it
DO take my word that it’s good tho
Mar 3, 2025
ok i have revisited it since then but it’s been a while and when tristesse/joie came on in the natural wine bar the other night i suddenly regained my will to live and man this whole record fucking rips. i found it originally when MTV was featuring ‘je veux te voir’ nearly constantly in 2009. les femmes is also a really good song
Nov 4, 2024
📀
the way i could write a world-changing 33 1/3 about this album!!! oh my goodness. (this is the kind of album you write after achieving meteoric pop success if you are a serious person, in case any inescapably famous singer-songwriters are taking notes.)
but for real -- this album is at once a perfectly-preserved late 90s time capsule (neurotic, stylish, a hint of a sneer, but real hope underwriting it all) and also secretly about us, right now, in the year of our lord 2024. it's fierce and smart and darkly hilarious. it's about going to therapy and getting your dad to go to therapy, and then feeling weird imagining the kind of dark shit your dad must be working through in therapy. it’s about trying to search for the divine while watching a bunch of idiot rich people get influenced into paying $2000 for like past life regression readings or whatever and feeling weird about the idea that they’re searching for the same divine you are, because if they’re looking for it too then it can’t possibly be the real thing, can it? it’s about being the bright young thing who wrote jagged little pill and suddenly finding all of your interpersonal relationships totally unworkable because everybody is too blinded by the brightness of the young thing who wrote jagged little pill to let you also be a human being. it’s about feeling so old already at 24 and looking back on your teenage self at a tender distance as if those days were a lifetime ago, as if you’re actually any wiser now. it’s about wondering if anything you will ever do is ever, ever going to be good enough. alanis’s lyrics here are biting and precocious and the songs are just so chatty (witness “front row” in which she layers four entire extra verses behind the chorus, effectively writing a whole bonus song because the situation is just too complicated to explain in four minutes) and they’re talking about all the same things we talk about now, in the same way we talk about them now, except without all the self-serious posturing so many of our contemporary songwriters fall prey to. (“the couch” is somehow both the most earnest and the least corny song anybody has ever written about therapy.) i know this album must have hit properly when it came out because it was the only thing my mom played in our house for the entire calendar year of 1999, but it feels so preternaturally tailor-made for the moment we’re in now that i can’t believe it hasn’t had one of those improbable tiktok renaissances or whatever that seem to keep happening. highly recommend a revisit or a first acquaintance if you haven’t made one.
Feb 6, 2024
