Consumer Guide Album

Janis Ian: Aftertones [Columbia, 1976]
Ian here establishes herself as the most technically accomplished popular vocalist of her (post-rock? post-folkie? pre-Vegas?) generation. She's even managing to curb the melodrama, as well as permitting herself unaccustomed glints of humor. But if you want to glimpse the crippling intellectual limitations of this sort of accomplishment, just get a load of her library, thoughtfully depicted on a cover that also features an open aerogram and an enigmatic mirror-as-window through which peers the artiste. There they stand, all her sources: a Modern Library Camus, The Second Sex, The Greenwich Village Bluebook, How to Survive in the Woods, and that encyclopedia of secondhand angst, Colin Wilson's The Outsider. How existential. One thing, though--mirrors are good windows only when surviving in the woods isn't something you ever have to think about. B-