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OTTAWA - Being Thanksgiving, it made perfect sense that Alanis Morissette should throw a gig at the National Arts Centre last night.
Thanksgiving, after all, is a holiday you go home for, and for Ottawa's favourite daughter, this homecoming was a long time coming, given the recent emotional turbulence of her personal life, including her split from fiance Ryan Reynolds and the death of her grandmother.
POSITIVE ZEN
But for the spiritually voracious Morissette, all events, even bad ones, have a certain positive zen about them, and as she's proven in the past with Jagged Little Pill -- an album that featured the breakup song You Oughta Know and sold nearly 30 million copies -- the 34-year-old songwriter can turn salt into something very sweet indeed.
In fact, as breakup albums go, Flavors of Entanglement begs comparison to the all-time classic heartbreak album, Joni Mitchell's Blue.
Last night's show, however, didn't live up to the hype.
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The concert began with Morissette's band of five men playing in the dark strobe lighting while Morissette's prerecorded vocals played over the speakers.
Ironically, that was the only time that Morissette's vocals were not buried below the band in the sound mix.
Unlike Mitchell's odes to grief, Morissette's songs show she is also comfortable with a little rage. And so the night went, heartbreaking ballads countered by post-industrial rock.
After that short intro, Morissette stomped out on stage, looking sullen in black but still attacking her microphone with ear-ringing vocal power on The Couch and Uninvited.
Yet, all the while, Morissette looked out of sorts and vaguely uncomfortable, as if she was singing a sexy song in front of her family. On the sweet, single-piano ballads such as Not As We, she stood quietly in a half-embrace and sang with strong heartfelt emotion.
Then, with a flick of her long black hair, she threw herself into heavy industrial rockers such as Versions of Violence, Flinch, Moratorium, Hand In Pocket, Citizen of the Planet and You Oughta Know, jumping spasmodically as if doing cathartic calisthenics.
Morissette is not the most polished or rhythmic physical presence I've seen, and I found all of her physical antics distracting.
But there aren't many singers around who can turn up the vocals the way she can.
HALF-HEARTED
Alas, horrible sound issues rendered much of Morissette's energetic performance moot.
After all, if you can't hear her, what's the point?
The acoustic dead zone picked up marginally after Morissette and her band formed a song circle to play Ironic for her encore.
In the end, I thought it was a terribly uneven concert, only half-hearted, as if she was keeping the best part of her show for later.
All the elements were there for a successful performance. Her band was terrific and the hall was full.
Yet for some reason, it all kind of fell apart.
But Ottawa still loves Alanis Morissette.