Alanis Morissette releases ambient meditation album The Storm Before the Calm

The maker of a famously furious album is back with its polar opposite. The Storm Before the Calm is Alanis Morissette’s aid for meditation, a series of soothing instrumentals designed to help the listener achieve a state of inner serenity. It fulfils the opposite function to her gargantuan 1995 hit Jagged Little Pill, which opened with the Canadian-US star uttering the ominous words: “Do I stress you out?”

Phrased in the song “All I Really Want”, that pointed question was directed at a lacklustre boyfriend with commitment and communication issues, whose stress levels presumably rose with each gauntlet thrown his way by the impassioned singer (“Enough about me, let’s talk about you for a minute”). He took his place among the album’s rogues’ gallery of lying, conniving, fainthearted men, like the duplicitous ex who Morissette rails at in “You Oughta Know” and the sleazy record exec who gets his comeuppance in “Right Through You”.

These unpromising portraits of American masculinity struck a big chord. Jagged Little Pill is one of the most successful albums ever, with an estimated 33mn sales. Only 21 when it came out, Morissette didn’t enjoy the fame, or infamy, that it brought her. She later said that intrusions into her private life gave her post-traumatic stress disorder. A counterattack by the viperish men of the music press depicted her as an unhinged avatar of unreasonable female anger, like a grunge-era version of Glenn Close’s bunny-boiler from Fatal Attraction.

At the same time, of course, Morissette’s assertiveness made her an icon to her numerous female fans. Over the long duration, their viewpoint has won out. Jagged Little Pill is now championed as a key record from the 1990s, jumbling up the stereotypically masculine rage of rap and rock with the no less stereotypically feminine form of confessional songwriting. In 2018, a hit jukebox musical based on it opened on Broadway. The dissatisfied young woman of Morissette’s songs has found her peace in the pantheon of classic albums.

The Storm Before the Calm finds its maker in a calm space, too — the meditation room of Morissette’s Los Angeles home, to be precise, where Tibetan singing bowls and shamanic drums help the cross-legged singer attain a state of deep attunement. There are no pointed questions uttered here about whether she is stressing you out. In fact, there are no lyrics at all. Wordless vocalisations are sung, chanted or hummed in a chiming, shimmering series of soundscapes devised with Dave Harrington of New York electronic duo Darkside.

A self-described member of the intensely feeling ranks of the “HSP” — highly sensitive people — Morissette’s antennas still quiver as acutely as they did in her Jagged Little Pill days. But rather than angry songcraft, the results are some really quite decent ambient works. There is a hint of krautrock’s cosmic music in “Safety — Empath in Paradise”, while “Restore — Calling Generation X” is chill-out peace offering to the snarky generation of apathetic ironists that Morissette was anomalously born into. The useless slacker boyfriend of “All I Really Want” can rest easy: he is forgiven.

★★★☆☆

‘The Storm Before the Calm’ is released by Sony Music