Lennon: 5:30 Saturday Morning

It's a widely held assertion that pop music should be popular, and that the state of contemporary music can be defined by what makes it onto MTV, VH1, and the Billboard Top 10. The mainstream may indeed matter, but a blinkered approach can lead to wildly unsupportable assertions, like the common belief that Radiohead is the only band recording adventurous modern rock, or that Moby is electronica's only genius, or that pop music has been permanently corrupted by a rotting pile of teenybopper vocal groups and earnest mid-tempo rock balladeers. Into this milieu steps Lennon, a 19-year-old middle-Tennessee metal diva whose debut album, 5:30 Saturday Morning, has been mentioned in Rolling Stone's "Hot Issue" and Entertainment Weekly's "New Faces" feature, and has even garnered a plug from MTV's Kurt Loder. ("Refreshing to come across a teenage performer who isn't blonde, writes her own songs, plays an instrument, and kicks ass," he writes.) All this, months before the album was even released. Surely these people should know better, because 5:30 Saturday Morning is a blatant Frankenstein job, a cynical pastiche of teen-sex-toy posturing, Tori Amos-style victim-becomes-perpetrator harangues, and the most generic of grinding techno-metal. The whole enterprise is calculated to provoke, from the thudding album opener "Property Of Goatfucker" to the piano-backed, torch-song stylings of the title track; it's all meant to frame Lennon as a versatile, bracingly honest performer, in step with current trends and unafraid of her own sexuality. But the truth is that she has a nondescript voice that has clearly been trained to fill the room, and she possesses a merely adequate grasp of rock songwriting (if "rock" can be reduced to a setting on a sequencer). There's a certain bravado to the way "Couldn't Breathe" shoehorns Rage Against The Machine riffing, Sarah McLachlan trip-hop, and a twee acoustic bridge into a bit more than four minutes, but the genre-hopping feels opportunistic and inorganic. It's all screech and squeal, with a layer of sordid seductiveness. Lennon's music might well appeal to people who subsist on a diet of scrubbed-up Hit Parade aspirants, but they'd be fooling themselves if they thought she wasn't as precisely packaged.