The Alanis Morissette Albums Ranked
After listening to JAGGED LITTLE PILL, I was enamored with Alanis Morissette. The Canadian pop-star-turned-alt-angst-girl put out what I once claimed was a near-perfect record back in 1995. And while I still think the album is indeed fantastic, subsequent strolls through Morissette’s discography have left me generally a little bit lukewarm. It’s hard to capture the moment like she did in 1995, and while I don’t think Morissette’s work since then is necessarily trying to capture that very same moment, it hasn’t been able to keep up in quality (spoiler, I guess). And yet, there are things to enjoy within the artist’s oeuvre, guiltily or not. And so, I’ve evaluated Morissette’s nine albums below.
EDIT 6/28/22: Added THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM.
#10 — ALANIS (1991)
Favorite track: “Too Hot”
So yeah, before she burst out on the scene internationally with JAGGED LITTLE PILL, Morissette released two pop albums under the mononym “Alanis” in Canada. The first of these, ALANIS, was the more successful, but also the worse of the two. Just listen to my “favorite” track, “Too Hot,” to get an earful of what the self-titled record holds in store for you. This is early ’90s cheese, pure and simple, and while I like cheese, there’s nothing really special about ALANIS at the end of the day.
#9 — NOW IS THE TIME (1992)
Favorite track: “Real World”
Morissette’s sophomore pop effort was a slight improvement. NOW IS THE TIME was simultaneously a little too self-serious but also a bit richer musically than ALANIS; the song “Real World,” somehow, feels more…ambitious. Like its predecessor, though, NOW IS THE TIME also settles into a shiny mirage of silly pop music from the early ’90s, which I should point out was often a whole different mood than the silly pop music from the late ’90s. NOW IS THE TIME and 1992 still smacked of the ‘80s.
#8 — THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM (2022)
Favorite track: “Mania — Resting in the Fire”
THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM is certainly a surprise in the discography of Morissette. This lengthy ambient meditation album, clocking in at 106 minutes across 11 tracks, is unlike anything she’s made before. And although I’m not really an ambient guy, the alt-rocker seems to have pulled off something as fine as anything else within the genre. The record is fittingly full of relaxing music, perfect for studying and working as I see it (sorry, my mind is not yet prepared for actually meditating). But THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM is not without hooks, as Morissette turns up the energy a bit with some beats and uptempo song structure on the back half of the album. This is especially noticeable on the relatively overwhelming “Mania — Resting in the Fire.” The rest is indeed fairly enjoyable, but as I said, ambient music is not really my thing, so the impact of this record is basically minimal. It’s not as grating as the early pop stuff from Morissette, but THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM also isn’t engaging enough to top her more conventional releases.
#7 — FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT (2008)
Favorite track: “In Praise of the Vulnerable Man”
Speaking of cringey time periods: FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT was released in 2008, and its sound, combined with its album cover, really let you know it. The record feels like Morissette trying to fuse Evanescence and mid-2000s dance music. It’s, on the whole, not successful. “In Praise of the Vulnerable Man,” which has lyrics that really make me shudder, nevertheless proceeds musically more effectively than any other song on the album. The track does have a catchy chorus, and it’s not totally alone in that; “Moratorium” and “Citizen of the Planet” kind of achieve that as well. But as a whole, FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT is quite lackluster, somewhat boring, and, at times, grating.
#6 — SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE (1998)
Favorite track: “Would Not Come”
I am not a Morissette-voice-hater. There are a decent amount of them. However, when I say grating, that could be best applied to SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE, of all of Morissette’s albums. And that’s not entirely due to her admittedly “unconventional” voice. No, this “sophomore slump,” which was actually her fourth album (it was just the follow up to the successful breakout that was JAGGED LITTLE PILL, so a lot of people say it followed the trend), just annoyingly misses the mark on almost every track. I feel like many of the songs’ choruses are this close to hitting a great pop hook, but they never do. So it’s not even necessarily the sonics of the album that really grate; it’s just a total collapse of some of its promise. In spite of all that, “Would Not Come”’s strangeness actually makes it the most appealing track on SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE, but it’s certainly an outlier. The record, as a whole, feels like a failed experiment, one more interesting and therefore potentially more enjoyable than the albums before it on this list, but also one that must fall below the mediocrity level of Morissette’s discography.
#5 — HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS (2012)
Favorite track: “Til You”
Morissette returned from FLAVORS OF ENTANGLEMENT and a four-year-long hiatus between albums with HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS, an altogether more “mature” album than its predecessor. I don’t mean in lyrical content or vocal delivery, but in general songwriting and instrumentation. HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS doesn’t feel explicitly tied to its era, but neither does it exactly feel timeless. There’s a lot of soft rock on here that plays enjoyably enough, such as the track “Til You,” but I think the record is better than the sum of its parts. I don’t feel I can particularly point to anything exceptional on HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS, and that’s likely because it’s not an exceptional album. But it does feel like a more self-assured, coherent reckoning with aging as a star defined by youthful angst, and that’s respectable.
#4 — SUCH PRETTY FORKS IN THE ROAD (2020)
Favorite track: “Ablaze”
But if HAVOC AND BRIGHT LIGHTS felt like that eight years ago, the follow up, which came after the longest gap between albums in Morissette’s career, was able to up the ante. Morissette is meditative on SUCH PRETTY FORKS IN THE ROAD, but also more in tune with the origins of her stardom; a track like “Ablaze” fuses her contemporary, mellowed out soft rock sound with some of the urgency of a song from JAGGED LITTLE PILL. Too much of the album loses that fusion and tips the scale toward the former for SUCH PRETTY FORKS IN THE ROAD to reach true greatness, but it was a pleasant surprise nearly a decade after we got a new record from Morissette.
#3 — SO-CALLED CHAOS (2004)
Favorite track: “Knees of My Bees”
With SO-CALLED CHAOS and UNDER RUG SWEPT, Morissette was able to funnel the poppier sentiments of JAGGED LITTLE PILL into broader releases. In doing so, those records lost some of their…texture, or whatever made that benchmark album so appealingly raw. SO-CALLED CHAOS is the weakest of those two early 2000s records, but only slightly. “Knees of My Bees” is a catchy guilty pleasure, but it’s also representative of Morissette’s slight tangent into pop-rock star. JAGGED LITTLE PILL was never purported to be a heavy metal album, but Morissette reclaimed the solo female artist image (usually a pop star) while integrating some more diverse influences.
#2 — UNDER RUG SWEPT (2002)
Favorite track: “Hands Clean”
But as is clear, UNDER RUG SWEPT established this paradigm better than SO-CALLED CHAOS could keep it up. Some of the songs on it, like “Hands Clean,” feel like they belonged on an alternate follow up to JAGGED LITTLE PILL, but SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE can be forgiven for muddying the story there. Of course, one of the things that held back those few albums after JAGGED LITTLE PILL were their muddiness. Morissette was often criticized for being too wordy, and the lyrical structure may indeed have hobbled the pop hooks I craved on SUPPOSED FORMER INFATUATION JUNKIE. But with UNDER RUG SWEPT, she was able to write songs like “21 Things I Want in a Lover” and “So Unsexy” and render them as breezy, very listenable, catchy songs. UNDER RUG SWEPT may just have a special place in my heart as one of the two Morissette albums constantly in the rotation in my mom’s car, but it really is an affecting little piece of pop rock music.
#1 — JAGGED LITTLE PILL (1995)
Favorite track: “Head Over Feet”
But of course, the album I’ve constantly been comparing everything to takes the top spot. I would never claim Morissette was a one-hit wonder, but she sure does reckon with the blessed curse of having every critic compare her work to JAGGED LITTLE PILL for all time. But if there’s solace to be found in that, it’s that JAGGED LITTLE PILL was special enough for listeners to, eherm, fall “Head Over Feet” for it. While I corrected my initial assertion that the record is near-perfect, I don’t really have much critical to say about it. Ten of the album’s 12 tracks are total bangers, and the two that aren’t (“All I Really Want” and “Not the Doctor”) are still good! Morissette created a spectacular album with JAGGED LITTLE PILL, it’s true, but she also found her success in speaking in a tongue specific to the era. She reconciled the masculinity that dominated grunge, applied her pop origins to alternative angst, and influenced a whole generation of kids in the process. That she did it when she was just 21, “it” being creating one of the most seminal albums of the 1990s, made the story all the more compelling.
