Jewel: Goodbye Alice In Wonderland : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Last time out, Jewel called on dance beats and pop irony to save her from singer-songwriter tedium. Goodbye Alice in Wonderland, her sixth album, restores some of the tedium, sprinkling acoustic introspection into folk-pop tunes gratuitously beefed up with studio gloss and song-doctor steroids. The result is mildly icky, with Jewel murmuring about the "inertia of loneliness" and stretching her thin voice past its limits on the huge choruses. A handful of songs -- including the breezy, pretty title track -- work up some palatable L.A. pop, but those moments are surrounded by singer-songwriter cliches and painfully precious asides. The most unfortunate sequence starts with "Good Day," where Jewel stages an early-morning conversation with herself in a baby-doll murmur, then follows up with a warbling rocker about how Hollywood is full of phonies and crazies. Goodbye Alice in Wonderland might keep Jewel on the charts, but its bright come-ons sound both overdone and undercooked.