Laura Stevenson: Cocksure

Though it wasn't as heavy as the brooding grunge it shared Modern Rock airwaves with at the time, the peppier alterna-pop of the '90s often cut just as deep. Acts like the Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield, and Matthew Sweet disguised depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz—you could sing along to some of their songs for weeks before even noticing they might be a cry for help. So it's easy to see why Laura Stevenson looked to power pop's flannelled era for her fourth album, Cocksure. The New York singer-songwriter has never shied from self-effacing thoughts, and by dialing up the pop she gives herself even more cover to let her antipathy run wild. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest.

Stevenson's '90s makeover represents a sharp course correction from her sleeper 2013 album Wheel. That record was a true singer-songwriter affair, rooted in folk-rock and country and highlighted by ornate ballads flushed with tasteful strings and horns. She clearly poured a lot of time into it. Cocksure, on the other hand, is as assured and impulsive as its title. Though it's bookended by two big, showy numbers that would have would have slotted seamlessly onto Wheel— "Out With a Whimper", a Rilo Kiley-sized emotional wallop, and the regal grand finale "Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me"—the rest is driven by swift riffs and bubblegum hooks. Listeners who thought Stevenson's former Don Giovanni labelmate Waxahatchee might have done well to lighten Ivy Tripp with another "Coast to Coast" or two will find plenty of instant gratification on this one.

Stevenson's old Bomb the Music Industry! bandmate Jeff Rosenstock rejoins her here in a producer role, which might partially account for some of Cocksure's punk moxie, but underneath the speedy tempos Stevenson is consumed by the same delicate subjects that have driven all of her solo records: emotional retreat, the nagging fear that she's squandered her youth, and the irrational disdain she feels for those who care enough to try to lift her from her funk. "I'm fucking hideous and spiteful when I'm left to my devices," she lashes out on "Jellyfish", which juxtaposes the album's sweetest hook with its sourest image: Stevenson as a gelatinous blob sprawled flat on the couch, motionless and essentially dead to the world but with a stinger pointed at anybody who might dare to poke her. She doesn't need to be told it's an awful way to live; she knows. "I'm wasting away my life and gifts on being a piece of shit," she concedes, if only so she doesn't have to hear somebody else say it.

That all might make the album seem like a buzzkill, but it never is. One of the joys of the album is simply hearing her cycle through so many slight variations of '90s alternative, and how she always manages to find the right shade to counter her dour mood. "Happier, Etc." matches another plea to be left alone to slaphappy pop-punk. The exuberant guitars on "Claustrophobe" blast out of the same Kitty Pryde-postered garage as the Blue Album, while the jangly "Life Is Long" channels the great, underrated heroes of sad-sack '90s guitar-pop: the Gin Blossoms. That band may not be the hippest touchstone for a millennial songwriter, yet perhaps more than any other they embodied the same mantra that Stevenson wears so well on Cocksure: When life gives you lemons, sugar the fuck out of them.