There are some albums that define a time in your life. The albums that you constantly listen to, or hear at parties in a particular period. The one that defined my first year of college was Jagged Little Pill, by Alanis Morissette.
Never reaching the same heights with her work since, Jagged Little Pill was new, dangerous, agressive. In a time dominated by “grunge” and Nirvana, here was a girl who could play guitar with the best of them. Not only that, she wasn’t afraid of speaking her mind with some very agressive and provocative lyrics for the time.
Jagged Little Pill featured guest musicians including Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea and Dave Kushner (now with Velvet Revolver), and never left my CD player for months.
2005 is the 10th Anniversary of this seminal album, and it has been completely re-recorded as an “Acoustic” album.
I’m not a big fan of re-producing albums, Bon Jovi attempted it, and ended up with an awful recording. I was half laughing and half crying at “This Left Feels Right”.
Sometimes “re-imagining” songs works. To go back to Bon Jovi for a second, whenever they play their first hit “Runaway” live now, it tends to be an acoustic version, which is much slower, and more thought-provoking as a result. So does re-imagining Jagged Little Pill work?
Well, yes and no. There is nothing outstanding on this album. The songs are pretty much the same. This is not the drastic remixing that we have seen by other artists. The songs that were slower on the original hardly feel touched, such as “Mary Jane”. A good song in its own right, and still very listenable.
The angrier songs simply do not work. The passion and anger in “You Oughta Know” seems diluted, and the song is weaker as a result. Radio-favourite “Ironic” is simply a toned down version of the original, with a subtle lyric change. While amusing, and a nod to fans of the original that time and social attitudes have moved on a bit, it simply doesn’t rhyme and seems forced. It might work well live, but on the record, it seems a bit silly.
Far and away the best track is the “Hidden” track – “Your House”. I never liked the original, which was simply Morissette unaccompanied on vocals, this now feautres piano, and is all the better for it.
Morrissette has never acheived the same success in the UK as she had with Jagged Little Pill, and this album could be seen as a deliberate cash-in. However, it does have its merits, but mainly as a companion album to the original. One for saturday night, the other for Sunday Morning.