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Liz Phair’s new album Funstyle is extremely strange. Whether you enjoy or even approve of the album depends in large part on your awareness of Phair’s cluttered musical history, your tolerance for the art of an album-long joke and your appreciation for gestalt.

Track by track, the album is a fetid mess; incorporating B-grade alt-country, bhangra, rap, funk, electronica and the odd ballad, Phair fails to provide even the slightest hint of musical cohesion or clarity. This is partly due to amateur production by Phair herself: The album is entirely self-produced, available on Phair’s (very) homemade website for a meager six dollars, and depending on the version you download, available with a variety of different track orders. But it’s also kind of the point.

The album is lyrically, well, hilarious. On otherwise non-starter “Satisfied,” Phair wails near the end of one of her verses “I remember you, when you held my hair, as I puked, oh, everywhere.” This line is gross (the brilliance being the pause before everywhere, which makes the line especially surprising and disgusting) and jolts the listener from the coffee-shop daze that the song had previously inspired.

The skit/song “Smoke” describes Phair’s attempts to enter a party. As she is refused for the umpteenth time, she gives up, literally says “Fuck it” and leaves to go smoke weed with her friends, as the bouncer cattily replies “Have fun on land!” Apparently, the party was on a boat.

It’s worthwhile to provide a brief reminder of Phair’s musical history: Former indie-rock icon whose debut with Matador Records, Exile in Guyville, constituted a hilarious and iconic feminist rebuttal of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street and rocketed her to fame, fortune and intense media scrutiny. Her next two albums, Whip-Smart and Whitechocolateeggspace were in the same vein musically but each received less acclaim than its predecessor. Then Phair “sold out,” signing to Capitol records and releasing two albums of schlocky rock-pop, best characterized by the toothache-inducing, semi-successful single, “Why Can’t I”? Phair was ripped apart by critics for this musical transformation, and in 2010, dropped from Capitol, has become an outcast, ostracized from both the world of pop and that of indie rock.

This messy past goes a long way in explaining the confounding nature of Funstyle. Phair comes off as the cool chick who has been bullied so many times that she’s learned to preemptively make fun of herself to escape the pressure that comes with sincerity. The most telling song “U Hate it” begins with two executives discussing a “new Liz track.” The first executive asks the opinion of the second who promptly responds “I hated it,” causing the former to agree with the latter’s opinion as quickly as he can.

This is all to say, Phair is in on the joke, which means the album is a failure, but a failure on its own terms, which is arguably a success. Confusing, right? The most cogent thing one can say is that this is not an album for your typical music fan, but rather for either Liz Phair fans who know what their hero has been through, or for anyone who’s interested in musical evidence of the havoc that fame, fortune and intense media scrutiny can wreak on a smart, talented and funny woman.

3 out of 5 stars