Every time I hear The Vapors' "Turning Japanese," I think it's the perfect song for Green Day to cover: loud, bouncy and full of references to masturbation. But while Billie Joe was busy penning his own odes to onanism, Liz Phair beat him to the punch, and convinced the members of Material Issue that they'd be the ideal band to back her on her own rendition of the '80s classic.
Even though Phair's cover of "Turning Japanese" is, to many, the selling point of her new EP, Juvenilia, it is only one of eight songs celebrating a younger period in the gutsy guitarist's musical life. Most of the tracks are previously-unreleased material written during the "Girlysound" years, when Phair was "still in high school or early college, and getting out from under the influence of my parents," the singer explained in a press release from her label, Matador.
Phair and Material Issue give the Vapors' most popular tune an energetic salute, letting her deep, throaty delivery slip into an impeccable faux-British accent in spots while the band crunches out the infectious melody behind her.
"Jealousy," the opening song on Juvenilia, is the only other fast-paced track on the EP. Although it appeared on Phair's most recent album, Whip-Smart, it (like much of the music on this new album) is reminiscent of moments on Phair's 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville. Bluesy guitars, maracas and rumbling drums wrap around the singer's description of a relationship gone south after she discovers a few skeletons in her lover's closet.
The album quickly moves into several more haunting pieces, beginning with "Animal Girl," a sad and sly observance of female adolescence. "It's an animal girl and it's lying on the beach," she sings almost cautioningly, "Its ass can surf in the sand while its head's asleep." Later, she brings back the notion of playing dumb to catch the attention of men: "I know all I need to know." Meanwhile, a single piano plays like waves pushing against a sandy beach.
"California" is a peculiar track in which the verses tell a story of two bulls standing on a hill overlooking a pasture full of female cows and arguing about what to do with them. The chorus cuts in between segments of the spoken tale with the lines "And I tried to tell you before/That that's why I left California." Surfer-styled guitar adds flavor to the piece, but illuminates little: Phair leaves the listener to make a connection between her fable and chorus.
Phair's treatment of the hick attitude follows in "South Dakota." She deadpans the tone of testosterone-laden cowpokes with lines like "Hey we're going to a rodeo town/I think I'm gonna get drunk and fuck some cows," then switches to a countryesque twang for the chorus: "Hey all you cityfucks/It's a prairie man's world." The guitar drones underneath this one, perhaps the engine of an old pickup shifting gears across the flatlands.
Phair sorts through two levels of communication breakdown in "Batmobile" and "Dead Shark." "Batmobile" laments the sense of being out of place in a particular group. Although Phair wrote the song about her family, it fits any kind of alienation: "And I hope you all will see/There just isn't a place here for me... I just can't take any of you seriously/And I can't keep keeping myself company." In the latter song, Phair uses the dead shark to symbolize a relationship dying of inactivity and directionlessness: it's heavy, listless, and impossible to carry forward.
"Easy" is the closing track on Juvenilia, its echoing melodies and unearthly vocals mourning the ghostlike return of an old lover with unfinished business. "I laughed when I heard you died/'Cause I didn't know what else I was gonna do/Now I laugh when I see you alive/'Cause I just think you're pulling my leg." Phair drives her message home in the last lines of the song: "You can haunt the halls, but you can't ask me to make you feel at homeit's not that easy."
On much of Juvenilia, Phair's electric guitar is her only accompaniment, laying itself down modestly underneath her deep vocals. The resultant sound gives the listener a sense of fellowship with Phair as she shares these pieces of her past, thoughts harbored from her youth. The whole album, especially the Girlysound tracks, has an underproduced feel that could be described both as simplistic and hypnotic, as artless or addictive. Her lyrics, as always, are often bold and even crude, yet they sparkle with incomparable wit, intelligence and vulnerability. Though it seems impossible for such qualities to exist simultaneously, Phair pulls it off with skill, a lot of honesty and a little bit of guitar.
This article was originally published in Addicted to Noise.