Whatever

AIMEE MANN: "Whatever" (Imago)

SHE'S PROBABLY too closely allied to the corporate rock mainstream to be embraced by the Riot Grrrl fraternity but in Whatever, Aimee Mann has produced an album that dissects the sexual politics of the Nineties with far more precision than anything Huggy Bear and their angry young chums have yet been able to muster.

At a shade over thirty, the former 'Til Tuesday singer is hardly a geriatric but she's been round the block a few times and uses the emotional highs and lows encountered along the way to draw thumbnail sketches of relationships won, lost and simply abandoned, that are as honest as they are real.

The opening 'I Should've Known' seethes with a mixture of anger, hurt and frustration, but no matter how deeply Mann becomes immersed in her feelings, she never loses sight of the pop aesthetic and ensures that if you don't want to buy into the message, there's always a chorus to hum till everyone round you's been driven to derision.

Songs like 'Fifty Years After The Fair', which finds Roger McGuinn rendering a little 12-string assistance, and the deceptively jaunty 'Could've Been One' demonstrate that musical maturity doesn't necessarily equate to blandness and with the mocking arrival of 'Stupid Thing', the term 'adult rock' finally regains the respectability it lost in the Eighties when it was shanghaied by the Reo Speedforeigners of this world.

Elvis Costello says he cried when he heard '4th Of July' and I don't think it was because he was peeling onions for his and Cait's dinner at the time. An intensely personal tale of abandonment, Mann's voice sounds childlike and vulnerable one moment, resigned and sadly old beyond its years the next. "Oh baby, I wonder if when you are older/Someday you'll wake up and say, 'My God, I should have told her what would it take?/ But now here I am and the world's gotten colder and she's got the river down which I sold her.'"

Even out of context it's a highly emotive image and set against a suitably understated acoustic backdrop, it's not hard to see why Mr. McManus was driven to tears.

Whereas the Huggies and their compatriots seem to have dug in for a prolonged Gender War, Aimee Mann has long since realised the futility of petty point-scoring and prefers instead to dwell on areas such as mutual understanding and respect, a two-way trade which allows her to be both feminine and a feminist.

That's certainly the deal on 'Mr. Harris', the string-swathed story of a relationship with an older man, and 'I Could Hurt You Now' where Mann makes a cheating partner aware that she could pay him back with interest but won't demean herself by sinking to his level.

Anyway, enough of 'manifestos' and 'agendas'. What's important is that the songs on Whatever matter - really matter - and how many albums can you say that about?

• Stuart Clark