NOT THE CD OF THE WEEK:Avril Lavigne: Under My Skin
Nearly everyone under the age of 15 appears to have swallowed the official line on Avril Lavigne: that she is an authentic symbol of punk rebellion, an antidote to manufactured pop. Everyone else is perplexed, largely because she could be no more obviously manufactured if she had a barcode taped to her forehead.
The best-known songs on her debut, Let Go, including Complicated and Sk8r Boi, were the work of the Matrix, a production team famed for working with Britney Spears and Ricky Martin. And it showed: most of Let Go sounded exactly like mainstream stadium rock.
But Lavigne has spent most of the two years since Let Go‘s release rubbishing the Matrix’s contributions and their name is now absent from the credits. Instead, she has collaborated with Chantal Kreviazuk, a Canadian singer-songwriter — not a seismic change in direction, although there are fewer uptempo tracks.
Under My Skin‘s (Arista) forte is the glossily produced power ballad, which swells from a piano intro into an epic, guitar-laden finale. Lavigne has the vocal equipment to cope, but it is hard to muster much excitement. The music is so anodyne that you don’t pay much attention to the lyrics. This proves to be a small mercy: examination of the CD booklet reveals that prolonged exposure to her words could leave a previously healthy adult rocking backwards and forwards in a foetal ball.
Current single Don’t Tell Me at least has some relevant advice to impart to her pubescent female fans, but nearly every other song is an inexplicable petulant sigh, a moan of ”whatever”. But perhaps that’s the secret of Lavigne’s appeal to her teenage audience.
Adolescent angst is assumed to be common currency in rock. But angst-ridden adolescents are rarely as interesting as that. In fact, they are boring, repetitious, self-obsessed, surly, uncommunicative. In that respect Lavigne may well be the most authentic artist in pop. — Â