Alanis Morissette

Hopefully starting a trend of major artists using smaller venues in which to road-test new material, Alanis Morissette played to her strengths on Wednesday night in front of a partisan audience.

Keeping in touch with her core fan base with live rehearsals is a smart ploy and on this basis it's easy to understand the rock-solid empathy she maintains with them.

But is she the Sylvia Plath of rock music? Her appeal is based on wordy, self-expressive and overwrought diatribes hitched to muscular US rock. New songs were, thankfully, shorn of the frustrating psycho babble of most of the material on her second major label album, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie. Songs such as Hands Clean, Narcis- sus, Precious Moments and 21 Things were all quite focused and concise, sounding as if Morissette has been taking much-needed lessons in selfediting.

The older material (from her debut major-label album, Jagged Little Pill) was, inevitably, greeted with a plethora of peace signs and fist-waving: Hand In My Pocket, You Learn, All I Really Want, Thank U, Ironic, You Oughta Know were the crowd-pleasers everyone wanted to hear, the last of those in particular still sounding like one of the most terrifically honest and angriest songs about post-relationship emotional scars.

A gauche teen pop star in a previous life, Morissette has flowered into an attractive linch-pin of the 24/7 MTV generation. Still in her mid20s, with almost 40 million records sold, it looks as if she's here for the long haul, her ambition luckily fusing with the apparently insatiable need for Gothic confessionals. Perhaps being the Sylvia Plath of rock music isn't such a bad thing after all.