The Places

“How I longed to kiss those sweet lips/Those sweet lips, the mouthpiece for a dick,” Amy Annelle muses at the close of the sort-of pop-basic, offhandedly digressive singer-songwriter diary entry we once expected from Liz Phair. The very picture of drollery, she narrates along to the warm, descending-scale plod of a Fender Rhodes electric piano: Girl meets up with “bellicose photographer” date at an NYC drug party; they blow off to seek out a legendary looney bin on Roosevelt Island, only to discover the joint has gone residential. We never do find out why her would-be suitor is a jerk or why found-sound samples are dripped on throughout, but it doesn’t much matter, really.