Still complicated

Avril Lavigne performs in Cologne, Germany. (Lars Baron/Getty Images)

Like most 22-year-olds, Avril Lavigne is a mess of conflicting impulses that are further complicated by the abundance of exciting new opportunities. All of these come to a head on her third album, The Best Damn Thing, released worldwide April 17 by Arista, the record company that signed her when she was only 16.

A lot has changed for Lavigne in the past five years. For one thing, she can now legally consume alcohol in the U.S., her country of residence since she stopped hanging around pizzerias in Napanee, Ont., and devoted the rest of her adolescence to becoming a pop-star punkette. On The Best Damn Thing’s I Can Do Better, she swears, “I will drink as much Limoncello as I can,” apparently unconcerned about the punishment that accompanies a liqueur hangover. But at least she’s outgrown the affection for Jagermeister and Grey Goose vodka she professed to Maxim magazine in 2004.

Another exciting development in her life is her chance to enjoy marital relations with Deryck Whibley, the Sum 41 frontman, whom she married last July. Besides co-writing and playing guitar on several songs, Whibley contributed to the new album by photographing his missus in a variety of tasteful poses that only qualify as erotic if you have a thing for fishnet stockings.

Lavigne returns the attention in the new song Hot, which – despite all the lyrics about letting “you do anything again and again” and wanting to “show you all the places you’ve never been” – sounds more perky than lustful. (Oddly, the reverse holds true for Hilary Duff’s current hit With Love, on which the reigning champ of teen stars coos sexily and convincingly over a throbbing electro beat.)

Finally, Lavigne has taken advantage of her newfound status as an adult to use adult language. Already risking censure by using the d-word in the title, The Best Damn Thing comes in two versions – the one with the Parental Advisory logo has the cusswords. Those who purchase that disc can hear Lavigne say she’s “the motherf---ing princess,” a claim otherwise obscured in the radio version of the single Girlfriend. It’s also unclear whether the phrase is audible in the foreign-language renditions of Girlfriend in Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Also back in the mix are “shit” in I Can Do Better and the “bitch”/“slut” double-whammy in Everything Back But You. And we can’t forget the “get ready, motherf---er” in the bridge for I Don’t Have to Try. Concerned parents can take some consolation in the fact that she has yet to record a cover of Cop Killer by Body Count or Prince’s Darling Nikki.

The new damn album. (Sony Music Canada)

But anyone who can get past The Best Damn Thing’s cheeky yet relatively mild provocations may discover something even more surprising: Avril’s actually skewing younger, not older. For all her racy talk, Lavigne has spurned the route to musical maturity that she tried to establish with her second album, Under My Skin (2004). Clogged up with the sort of anguished, lugubrious balladry that so often connotes sensitivity in contemporary pop – much of the blame for that rests on Chantal Kreviazuk, one of Lavigne’s songwriting helpmates at the time – the album had few of the radio-ready punk-pop anthems that made Let Go (2002) one of the decade’s biggest-selling debut discs. The lack of another Sk8ter Boi or Complicated was one reason sales of Lavigne’s sophomore effort were well shy of the 13 million mark reached by its predecessor.

Like all musical acts and their panic-stricken record companies, Lavigne must also face the reality of declining music sales across the board. It’s arguable that she’s less vulnerable to the effects of sales erosion than many acts, because her core fans belong to one of the few demographic groups that still buy CDs. The purchasing power of tweens was proven by the success of High School Musical. The soundtrack of the Disney TV-movie became the second-highest selling CD of 2006 (over four million copies in the U.S., plus millions more DVDs) – this despite the fact that hardly anyone over the age of 13 had ever heard of it.

Dirty words notwithstanding, it’s obvious that The Best Damn Thing is about shoring up Lavigne’s standing with tweens and teens rather than developing an audience that’s her age or older. And that’s very much to the album’s benefit. Girlfriend is the year’s giddiest piece of bubblegum pop, one of several songs that recycle old Ramones riffs in service of tightly constructed new confections.

It’s also one of many punctuated by shouts of “hey!” and other gambits that are tailor-made for call-and-response exchanges with audiences. Like Toni Basil’s 1982 smash Hey Mickey and Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl — a more recent variation that stated “shit is bananas” — many of The Best Damn Thing’s most upbeat numbers are essentially cheerleader routines. On the title track, Lavigne even spells out her name. (Don’t worry, Mom and Dad – the letters in A-V-R-I-L don’t stand for anything nasty.)

Participatory by nature, the album’s best songs may remain familiar fare but they’re energetically performed and often cannily crafted – Lavigne’s main collaborator here is Butch Walker, the tattooed former frontman for Chicago power-popsters Marvelous 3 who became an unlikely hit-maker for a roster of clients that includes Lindsay Lohan and Pink. Lavigne’s modest amount of punk cred is bolstered by the presence of former Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, Green Day producer Rob Cavullo and Whibley and Stevo of Sum 41.

The album only makes two dramatic deviations from its carefully considered menu of singalong-friendly rockers. Co-written by Walker, When You’re Gone avoids the overbearing histrionics that marred so many similar ballads on Under My Skin – with its soaring guitar line and symphonic pomp (the strings were recorded at Abbey Road), it’s positively Oasis-esque. Lying at the other extreme, I Don’t Have to Try opens with Lavigne scatting out her lyrics in a manner that doesn’t so much resemble a snotty pep squad leader as it does Peaches, the X-rated femme-punk maverick about whom Lavigne has enthused in interviews. Even weirder is how easy it is to hear the influence of Le Tigre in the song’s oddly high-pitched backup vocals and propulsive energy. (Lavigne’s guttural yell at the 2-minute 40-second mark is also more convincingly Iggy-esque than much of Pop’s own bellowing on the new Stooges album.)

Both songs point toward a sound that could endear Lavigne to more grown-ups should she give up on courting the High School Musical set. In the meantime, The Best Damn Thing accomplishes the serious business of keeping the kids on side, even if their parents may shudder whenever she lets that 22-year-old libido out of its cage. It’s enough to drive them to Limoncello.

The Best Damn Thing is in stores April 17.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

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