Paula Cole: Gems and clunkers.

This album has a split personality.

On one side, we have "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?", a brilliant, catchy tune that alternates bandpass-filtered husky white female rap verses with wonderfully contrasting lush choruses and lushness with tasty melodic tension in the bridge. The lyrics are one-dimensional (very reasonable when the goal's the top of the charts), beautifully crafted in that dimension, and delivered with precision (particularly the lovely sneer in the word "beer").

There is, in one of the "rap" verses, what sounds like an interweaving of almost-sung, more-or-less-pitched lines between the spoken parts (it is actually a voice quietly singing under the "rap" voice). This subtlety of craft is a thrilling and beautiful innovation that adds to the gem-like quality of the track (I wanted to buy the EP that features various mixes of this tune, but failing to find it, bought the album instead).

The "Cowboys" tune is joined in the pop camp by the respected hit "I Don't Want to Wait," nicely done if not nearly as clever. There are a couple of other OK cuts, too.

Then there's the angst-y stuff.

I'm sitting here with two masterpieces in front of me, Tori Amos' Little Earthquakes and Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, and these tell me that in lyric and delivery, it is subtlety and understatement that best invokes angst, fleshes it, stands it stark and poignant against snow-muted backdrops, tells us where it's come from and where it's going, and draws us, willing or not, from any place we might find ourselves standing at the moment to steep us in the artist's emotion.

Now it's true that restrained composition (and its proper delivery) is expensive for the artist in the hours spent swimming the inner seas to recall and identify the textures of pain, then in hours more transforming those into forms that bridge the space between artist and audience with immediacy, sympathy, and intensity. But there's no way around paying the dues, and it doesn't sound like Cole has done so.

"Tiger," up first, is doing OK until Cole lets loose with a retching yell that appears many times after on this CD, sometimes hammered repeatedly into the ears. Do you remember Yoko's unbridled screaming from her primal-therapy-period recording with John? If it taught us anything we hadn't known already, it was that angst pure is like Everclear (the liquor, not the band). One can hardly stand even one shot neat. Its only virtue is its wallop; most would rather drink anything else, if only a dilution of Everclear in something, anything, and to those who relish refinement (like our single-malt reviewers), it is abomination.

Cole's scream is the same each time it's delivered because it's a yell past the limits of vocal control. Its very power robs it of the possibility of delivering anything but its immediate content. Most of Morissette's vocal ornaments could be called screams, and there are many more screams on her CD than Cole's. But Morissette's screams don't jar. They don't sound repetitive. They are voiced humanly and meaningfully and melodically in a way that makes it fun to sing along with them.

Just a small comparison will show what I mean regarding lyrics. It may seem unfair to put Cole's lyrics up against Amos' (I'll ignore a professional review I just read of the watch-out-Tori ilk), but if Cole's going to frame her lyrics in Amos-style musical starkness, she'd better be able to write like Amos. However, compare Cole in "ME" to Amos in "Crucify":

Cole: "and it's me who is my enemy, me who beats me up"

Amos: "I've been raising up my hands, drive another nail in"

Cole: "me who makes the monsters"

Amos: "I gotta have my suffering so that I can have my cross"

Cole: "me who strips my confidence"

Amos: "I got a bowling ball in my stomach, I got a desert in my mouth"

You get the idea. I wouldn't recommend This Fire unless you already have good CDs by Morissette and Amos and you just want to add another name to your angst collection. Even then, listen to a friend's copy first.