Chugging from the get-go, ex-Go Go
Jane Wiedlin finds her own path devouring pop attitudes spiked with sardonic mischief on her 2000 album
Kissproof World.
Jangly opener
Icicle thaws quickylu into prickly sensations of summer surf-pop scents. And is that the Trio Bulgarka's grand-kids I hear? Softer touch-down
Feeling Like Flying permits am electric guitar to slide in between flashy break beats and Jane simply cools things into a mellow tale of caution. Good as it is, I do like my pop fizz a bit more shaken.
I was expecting something like Liz Phair's
Fuck & Run for some reason, but the exclamatory
Die Now! Pay Later! offers a quick chug nonetheless, soundtracking the everlasting youth of a dozen 90s teen drama titles sequences, and '
as seen on tv...played out...yeah!' fulfills what all good pop songs should exclaim.
Fallen wrestles with a thorny guitar dredge and lazy goth vibes. Title poof of pop
Kissproof World is an illuminant shimmer wave, finite and hungry for a reaction: '
baby it's cold out there, people are ugly there' might just have clinched it for me. Pop-dream goes sour on
The Good Wife and Jane knocks out yet another minute pop car crash of dystopian pleasure.
Jane's addiction to a killer hook kicks her kook into gear on
Sooner Or Later, injecting some anthemic cynicism, emoting and sniping '
something that means nothing'. Jazz-hand piano keys chip away, with the message being sooner or later the facade will crumble, and the sensation from '
I will be your mirror' is onto a winner.
Delicious payback
My Lovely Revenge has a chorus too fond of the snappy, word-winning and wound-nursisng verses to do any work but bask in shallowness, and I love it. Developed in concern for depletion,
Drain might make more sense if Jane turns out to be a really big True Blood fan (my first experience of a pop song about draining a vein).
Minor but tuneful,
Messy and
Muse repeat their choruses in an endearing evasion of writing songs that are better, but who needs to when the skill of her writing is this gloriously unassuming. Finally we get the truth (not that I don't enjoy Jane's smirking pop dreaminess) - downbeat closer
He's Not Talking is exhausted and fuzzy, with extinguishing synth and glistening keyboard vapours.
Sweet and sickly on the outside, prickly and heartfelt on the inside,
Kissproof World might not have the commercial grease of her hey day, but her lilting vocal bite is as slick as a sachet of KY.
Sooner Or Later is the hands-down keeper, and whilst the pure sensation of
Rush Hour has burnt out, her hard driving pays off with the mischevious endevours of such ditties as
The Good Wife and the stylistically-divorced
He's Not Talking.
Rating:
7/10
For me recently on a 4am girls and guitars bender: Cyndi Lauper (the fizzy acceleration of Money Changes Everything that doesn't touch the ground or the sides); 
The Bangles's Going Down To Liverpool (blue-sky jangly pop par excellence, it really sets sail with their harmonies, but of course it is Debbie hear who makes it so irresistibly wistful and imaginative this time - the Susanah Hoffs spotlight was yet to be switched on); 
Patty Smyth (her 1987 debut album is basically Cyndi meets Springsteen - lots of hightlights, her collaborators are in actual fact Eric Brazilian, Rob Hyman, William Wittman, Rick Chertoff, Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly, so this is no surprise); 
the enchanting Rooms On Fire from the bewitching Stevie Nicks, and Voice of The Beehive (the fleshed out expensive chorus of Scary Kisses never fails to set my adrenaline to a high setting). 
I'm also listening to the Divinyls, but it's the song Only Human On The Inside, and that was in the 90s - I always knew it as a Pretenders song (and that it was a cover), but Chrissy Amphlett's recogniseably expressive voice delivers the killer blow of the lyrics with more charm and radiance - and you need to wait for it's gentle fade out, at which point I wish it could go on for another 3 minutes itself. 
I do need to mention the Go Gos, and so Our Lips Are Sealed is their bubbliest moment, Jane almost over-took it with her own Rush Hour, and Belinda's girlier efforts were rendered iconic by her voice of steel alone - the Julia Roberts of the radio.
