Goodbye Lullaby

Avril Lavigne (RCA/Sony Music)

More than a year ago, Avril Lavigne was boasting that her next album would be her breakthrough into artistic adulthood. There was word of piano ballads, a largely acoustic set of songs, heart-on-sleeve emotion -it would be a Big Statement.

Like most Big Statements, Goodbye Lullaby starts with a perfume jingle. And like the not-quite-a-song Black Star, hawking Lavigne's fragrance of the same name while striving to propel a twinkly motif past the 90-second mark, the album as a whole is conflicted. In interviews, Lavigne has stated that she battled label executives who were pressuring her to put a happy face on more of the songs; she has also said she decided at one point that the album was too pensive and needed some bubblier tracks. Whether Lavigne caved in to corporate suits or to her own second-guessing is almost irrelevant; Goodbye Lullaby can't possibly match her original vision for what she has repeatedly claimed is her most personal disc to date.

Creative compromise would be fine and dandy if Lavigne's heart was still in candy-coloured mall-rockers. Girlfriend was a spiteful hair-yanker that could have soundtracked a bikini Jell-O wrestling match, but at least it was convincingly spiteful. What the Hell, on the other hand, finds Lavigne forcing herself to cut loose, from the stale roller-rink keyboards to the robotic brashness of the chorus. But it's better than Smile, whose uplifting central hook can't compensate for the shrill idiocy of party-hard hollers about being "a crazy bitch" and blacking out in the club. To her credit, Lavigne sounds more embarrassed than obnoxious singing this thing.

Wish You Were Here matches a high-impact R&B melody with a lyric that finds strength in vulnerability, but it isn't until Everybody Hurts offers the listener -and probably the writer -a shoulder to cry on that Lavigne's advance press for Goodbye Lullaby starts to make sense. The album's second half does away with rote fist-pumping and finds Lavigne inching toward Chantal Kreviazuk's tender comforts. Not Enough's anthemic rush confirms she can play to the cheapie arena seats while reaching for sincere introspection, and like some of the surrounding tracks, it sounds like a divorce song addressing Sum 41's Deryck Whibley. If Lavigne is looking inward, she isn't shutting fans out: these songs are both personal and universal.

The album ends with Goodbye, featuring melancholy strings and the closest thing to an angelic vocal Lavigne has laid down. A full hour of this would have been commercial suicide, but the ballad sounds far more meaningful to the singer than her apathetic brattiness elsewhere on the disc. And if Lavigne's fans are growing along with her, it's likely to be more meaningful to them as well.