We'll get the Liz Phair comparison out of the way quickly, and toss in a Jill Sobule nod just to be safe. However, Marianne Pillsbury packs her own punch and is carving out a post-riot grrrl niche for herself that could be something worth watching. She's already garnered songwriting awards for two of the tracks on The Wrong Marianne; she has a knack for matching scathingly funny observations with a peppy, dirty garage rock that should have people thinking "if Julianna Hatfield had joined The Pixies..." Now she's marching on the college radio scene.

It would seem that Pillsbury's best defense against the stupidity of men, life and her own bad judgment is a healthy dose of self-deprecation. "So I was puking and I got to thinking about what it was that got me drinking," she sings on "Sweet & Sour World", "And I couldn't quite remember but I suspect that it was something that happened last November." Her ex-boyfriends bear the brunt of her bluntness, and from the looks of it, Pillsbury has racked up more dysfunctional relationships than most of us would like to admit. Chief among them is the "unintentional asshole" who just wanted to be friends ("Unintentional"), the "Ex-Ex-Boyfriend" ("Then he complains that he's writing a screenplay and you are getting in the way..."), and the one-night stand who left a sweater behind, which confuses the hell out of our heroine ("Do not expect too much from a double-knit weave"). It's almost as though her album was concocted from the assembled memoirs of my own exes...

Ms. Pillsbury's brand of openness can be uncomfortable, but I'm all for it. "I'm not the kind of girl who waits cause maybe I just wanna get laid," she explains, even as she refuses to be someone's "Layaway Girlfriend". She also has no time for friends who bitch about their own relationships while she's stuck in singlehood ("Boo Hoo"). But underneath the witty one-liners and slick chords are a few nuggets that add a world of depth to what could otherwise be construed as a patently glib album. There's an awareness of the need for perspective in a relationship ("Supersize") and an admittance that her emotions sometimes get the better of her ("Swallow a Fly") that reveals a songwriter with a deft touch for balancing subtler themes with outright bawdiness.

I'll go out on a limb and say that overnight success is not in the cards for The Wrong Marianne, because modern rock radio still seems like a pretty tightly-knit boys' club. A cult following that overflows into the mainstream may suit Pillsbury better, anyway; it could be an improvement on the one-hit wonder syndrome that has plagued Meredith Brooks and Tracy Bonham. But the wild card that Pillsbury has going for her is autonomy: she self-released this disc and is handling the marketing as well. She has a sense for self-promotion, as evidenced by the un-ignorable purple packet of facial tissues emblazoned with a reference to her intended hit single "Boo Hoo". Given her willingness to think outside the box, the brutal self-honesty that borders on the hysterical and the all-important ability to craft a killer hook, it shouldn't be long before up-and-coming, post-"Girl Power" singer-songwriters are compared to Marianne Pillsbury instead of the other way around.