Waking Ear

Badly Drawn Boy/"River, Sea, Ocean" -- One of the few salvageable pieces from the spotty About a Boy soundtrack, even if it does sound like a children's song by Elliott Smith. I haven't listened to Have You Fed the Fish? yet, but I've read that it slides even further from the brilliance that was The Hour of Bewilderbeast.

Speaking of artists that seem to slip further and further from their former level of greatness, Liz Phair got bitch-slapped by the 'Fork during my absence Friday. Now, I agree that her later material hasn't been too swuft. And I do mean "swuft." But it's still hard to see the subject of many of my high school sexual fantasies (OK, not just high school, I admit it) get lambasted this way.

I haven't heard her new material yet, but I can definitively say that Pitchfork is wrong on one count. Liz Phair's promotional photos don't look like Avril, nor like Sheryl Crow. She looks exactly as I remember her, mean and black-eyed and bluntly sexy, just like the best moments of Exile in Guyville. Phair isn't model-hot, and she can't sing very well. Her image as a thoroughly human indie rock nerd was always one of her greatest assets, the other being the fucking great songwriting on Exile. Now the image is all she has left. Hopefully she and her songwriting partners don't squander it.