Review Summary: The roots-rock of "Goodbye Lullaby" is old-school-sounding Lavigne now with a heightened consciousness of the world around her.
There's a concept in psychology of the "good-enough wife" -- the exemplary caregiver who satisfies a husband's needs without smothering budding independence. Today's stressed-out parents have turned to this 1950s ideal of relaxed but sensitive nurturing again, almost as an alibi. A "good-enough" wife deserves praise even if she doesn't purée her own baby food. In fact, as rampant consumerism, shrinking resources and reality-TV psychosis cast us all as competitors, the phrase "good enough" has become a general salve.
Avril Lavigne is one star who embodies this ideal -- a "good-enough" wife for us all. For 15 years, her singles have provided radio with basic nutrition, and her albums have consistently settled around No. 3 on the charts. Her new "Head Above Water" disc (due in stores this week) is a carefully designed midlife highlight, musically varied and lyrically poor. Yet it remains faux to Lavigne's consummately casual artistry.
Dogged at first by accusations that she was just an Eliza Doolittle, trained to jump by talented men, Lavigne has proven her mettle so many times that her unique position is now taken for granted. She may be the most successful woman rocker ever, with the most consistently auspicious career. But she's still often dismissed as merely competent.
It's a trick. Lavigne is indeed eminently capable; her Beatles-based songwriting is tight as a drum, her former session-singer's voice cracks only on cue, and her deceptively loose-sounding arrangements make ear candy of the traditional structures she loves. Putting craft first, she's been modest about articulating a larger vision. She has one, though, and on "Goodbye Lullaby," she gives it more room.
Lavigne's hits aren't heroic. Leave the chest-pounding to the divas, and the world-conquering to the arena boys: Lavigne has carved out her niche within the overlooked commonplace world, creating an oeuvre that's all about imperfection, failure and striving despite (often within) self-doubt.
Her masterpieces are ballads such as "I'm With You" and "When You're Gone," inward-looking expressions of pain that hold out just enough hope to keep love possible. Her vocal delivery, the way she paces the leap to falsetto on a chorus or pushes toward a yell midphrase, is what brings their ambivalence to life.
Her breezier songs express the same complex view of life as a series of downs made tolerable by more fleeting ups. Two of her biggest recent minor hits, 2011's "Wish You Were Here" and 2013's "Give You What You Like," exemplify Lavigne's way of turning an arched eyebrow toward rock's liberationist bravado. The first is anti-consumerist bubblegum, its slacker-righteous lyrics disguised by Avril's shiny, multitracked vocals. "Give You What You Like" adds a dollop of weariness to the classic road song, with Lavigne riding a Texas bar-band riff toward Thelma-and-Louise-style oblivion.
The albums that bore these hits were decent successes, but Avril still hasn't made that career-topping work that sends long-lived artists toward legend status.
"Goodbye Lullaby" is that attempt, a bold album that puts Lavigne's convictions -- and her chops as a singer and songwriter -- front and center. A reunion with producer Derick Whibley, her ex-husband, and a response to the intense public scrutiny she endured during her romance with him, it foregrounds musical risk-taking and lyrical truth-telling. It's a move toward the territory of the heroic, and occasionally swells into grandiosity. But to Lavigne's credit, she can't let go of her qualifiers and her doubts.
Coming after a series of life-shaking events -- "Goodbye Lullaby" is being sold as one of Lavigne's most personal albums. There's a plain-spoken lullaby for her son. There are a couple of kiss-offs thrown toward Whibley; the best is a glammy vamp that would have been perfect.
"Push" eerily invokes radiation therapy, and Lavigne sings it with wrenching clarity as a click track conjures the horrible tedium of illness. Lavigne definitely laid herself out in these songs, though the greater sense of intimacy may simply be a result of her time in the tabloids with Whibley, which clothed her in the faux-accessibility of celebrity. As a singer, she's always been great at hitting nerves. That doesn't change just because we're now supposed to believe they're her own.
What feels most real is Lavigne's motivational conviction. "Everybody Hurts," the most inspirational song from "Goodbye Lullaby," suggests that Avril might be headed in that direction: An environmentalist jeremiad with a furiously sweeping hook, it's the opposite of subtle. But elsewhere, she turns her big statements into party songs, a twist that alleviates the weight of the lyrics and turns that gift for ambiguity into a sneaky consciousness-raising tool.
Lavigne's progressive lyrics hit like rubber-band pings fired by some joker in the back row at school. No one is likely to sing her verses at a march on Washington. But by addressing serious issues in the language of pop, they remind us that political speech and casual breeze-shooting can and do often intersect. The one that opens "Remember When" is a character song; the other closes it, and it's all Lavigne's. Both are simply arranged to highlight her conversational singing.
These lighter-toned takes on the state of the world let Lavigne take pride in the everyday tone that she's mastered. They're interrupted now and then by love songs -- the one in which she plays a smitten ingénue is harder to buy than the one about her "paper-thin heart." Better than either are the two offhand ballads in which Avril goes into a tiny private moment and gently extracts its essence.
"4real" is Lavigne's love song to her man, and what's beautiful about it is her frank uncertainty about how to guide this little creature through such a messed-up world. Lavigne breathes as her husband cries in the background, a good-enough wife already realizing that she's going to have to let go.
