It would be easy to dismiss Liz Phair’s latest album Funstyle as catastrophic. Phair has spent her career struggling with her musical identity, from her indie-darling persona (Exile in Guyville) to the slick, generic pop-industry product she became during her soul-sucking foray with a major label (Liz Phair, Somebody’s Miracle). It has all led to the release of the experimental and often wacky Funstyle, but one has to sift through the admittedly scattershot album in order to find the tracks that signal Phair’s bombastic return to her indie roots.

Liz Phair

Funstyle
Self-released

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Opening track “Smoke” starts out with Phair trilling over a poppy electronic beat and then segues into a cartoony skit, revealing that Phair knows her album won’t be well received with lines like “It's career suicide, kaboom.” “Smoke” and the truly bizarre “Bollywood” are infused with zany skits and some truly misguided spoken-word verses. In the faux-Indian-infused “Bollywood,” Phair bitterly “raps” about selling out in order to feed her kid, which, though not exactly pleasant to listen to, provides some context as to why Phair would release such a weird album. It is essentially a middle finger to the music industry that stifled and took advantage of her.

The closing track “U Hate It” also mocks the record executives and the music industry. It features voiceovers from record execs discussing how much they hate the album while Phair croons indignantly and makes terrible puns (“you’re being a penis … colada, that is”).

"You Should Know Me" is jarring in that it's so radically different from the nearly unlistenable “Smoke” and “Bollywood.” The track is the kind of stripped-down, slightly off-key song that made Phair into an indie hit back in the '90s. Another standout is the funky, horn-infused jam “My, My,” which finds the middle ground between her charmingly out-of-tune warbles and weird caricature of music that blights Funstyle. Its sexy swagger waxes nostalgic on early work like Exile in Guyville, but with a synthy overtone. She sings with a smirky lilt "Could have been a good girl, but I'm not," as if almost defying the listener to dismiss her latest album.

“Bang! Bang!” is surprisingly atmospheric, with Phair’s voice dreamily ricocheting. But this experimental track doesn't totally work. It starts to drag after a while, despite having a richly textured sound that with some tuning up could be fantastic. In fact, that's an inherent problem — it isn’t polished at all. It’s messy and incoherent, yet a refreshing departure from the overly produced junk Phair was releasing when she was still chasing after mainstream success.

When Phair isn’t getting caught up in poor satire and distracting listeners from the other more promising tracks, she actually demonstrates impressive range. From funky sounds to her earthier girl-and-guitar vibe, Phair’s talents occasionally manage to shine beneath some of the muck. Funstyle has Phair finally helming her own ship, and she uses this newfound creative freedom to explore new sounds. Now that Phair has had this little tantrum out of her system and has shed her pop sheen, she is free to reinvent herself as an independent songstress — hopefully minus the rap.