Janis Ian is for the trendies one of the most exciting, red-hot writer/performers in pop at the moment; for the rest of us she's definitely here to stay. With "Miracle Row,"… she has seized for herself the title of Girl Most Likely to Get Pop off Its Moribund Ass in the Late Seventies.

Like the lady herself, "Miracle Row" exudes theatricality. It has equal amounts of the high romance of the low life and the jaded, dark-red-nail-polish lows that accompany the high life. Ian's theatricality, like that of another Great Proletarian, Bertolt Brecht, may not be immediately discernible, but it is there. She, too, chooses street argot as her lyric form, and the non-chalant gut punch seems to be her favorite device. But she is more than an artistic descendant of Brecht in her sardonic, toughly humorous acceptance of an existential world in which the cunning, the avaricious, and the brutal all too often float to the top while the Lumpen below devour each other in desperation—she is also Brecht's Pirate Jenny come to stinging, poignant, poetic life.

Like Brecht, Ian is an angry artist. In the years succeeding Society's Child, her first musical outburst at the age of sixteen, it was touch and go as to whether or not the anger would consume the artist. At Seventeen, that bitter little paean to the arid joys of "settling for" (from "Between the Lines," her second "comeback" album) gave notice that the old fire could still scorch its subject despite its deceptively gentle melody. With "Aftertones," however, the mature Ian emerged. She kept traces of the daydreaming, slightly murderous gamine—the Pirate Jenny—that she'd always been, but she was now in control of herself and her enormous talents. Instead of blindly flailing at the objects of her scorn and only sometimes hitting the mark, she projected a serene self-confidence. This sense of assurance came through not only in her angry moments such as the hilarious and raucous Boy, I Really Tied One On (probably the best song of its kind since It Was Just One of Those Things), but also in her ability to be unabashedly and yearningly romantic as in I Really Would Like to Dance.

The songs in "Miracle Row" are chiaroscuro sketches in both words and music. Ian uses the technique masterfully in Party Lights, for instance. She sheds equal amounts of intense light … and the most chilling darkness … in telling the story of someone who has Made It, the guest of honor at one of those grotesque Marvelous Parties designed to show the world you've arrived….

The most ambitious track here is Miracle Row/Maria, two related songs about summer in a ghetto and a girl with "eyes like a demon lover's child." It succeeds admirably on every professional level …, but it fails ultimately because it is theatrical in the wrong context—[Brecht's] Mother Courage playing Radio City Music Hall. Absolutely on target in every way, however, unique and securely in Brecht-Ian territory, is the bloodcurdling Spanish-flavored serenade Will You Dance?…

["Miracle Row"] is a lovely exercise in seriousness without a trace of grandiosity. It's an album by a real person about real things.