She's 32 flavors and then some

Alanis Morissette

Flavors of Entanglement (Maverick)

ESSENTIAL "Torch"

Alanis Morissette busted out of the gate 13 years ago with "Jagged Little Pill," an album that redefined romantic purging for burned girls everywhere. And while she's turned out some interesting music since, nothing has matched the emotional wallop of Morissette's debut.

"Flavors of Entanglement" arrives in the wake of the artist's split with her fiancé, actor Ryan Reynolds (does it get any worse than being dumped for Scarlett Johansson?), but Morissette's approach to her pain, and everything else, has evolved. Personal growth and spiritual transcendence are the pillars of Morissette's music and world, so rather than catharsis, we get a healthy balance of heartbreak and self-affirmation spread out in all its wacky syntactical glory against a Guy Sigsworth (Bjork, Madonna) backdrop: dense electronics, vaguely exotic strains, beats lifted from the dance floor and the '80s.

It's a cluttered affair with bleeping, buzzing lows (harshly ambient tracks like "Straightjacket" and "Versions of Violence") and a handful of humble high points in a pair of lovely piano ballads. "Torch" is a lilting list of what Morissette misses in her departed lover ("your smell and your style and your pure abiding way"), while "Not As We" unfolds like a grief-stricken memo to self: "Day one, day one, start over again/ Step one, step one, I am barely making sense/ For now I'm faking it, till I am pseudo making it/ From scratch, begin again, but this time I as I and not as we."

This is a glimpse of Morissette at her most unfettered - on a search for knowledge and comfort that's proving as hard to pin down as a musical direction. [Joan Anderman]