POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ferron Turns Self-Analysis Into Fun

Throw out all those self-help books. Toss away those songs full of aimless anguish posing as poetry and profundity. Ferron, the long-lost leader of women’s music, is back. Performing Thursday at the Roxy to celebrate the release of “Phantom Center,” her first album in six years, the Canadian singer-songwriter made modern self-analysis seem easy, and even fun.

Not that the topics she tackles--the quests for love and identity--are simple and laugh-filled, but Ferron boils it all down to the basics and serves it up with style and, yes, poetry. “What’s the matter with harmless love?” she asks herself in one of her new songs. The answer, of course, is nothing; the point that it’s human to mess up a good thing; the effect to make the work of many of those in her musical and thematic ilk (cf. Indigo Girls) seem like a load of quasi-mystical, solipsistic psychobabble.

Like many of her musical ilk, former-folkie Ferron has moved in a New-Agey direction, though unlike most employs a sense of dynamics that keeps it from the usual somnambulism. Key Thursday were drummer Danny Fongheiser, who at times almost overpowered the rest of the band, and veteran viola player Novi Novog.

But Ferron’s most valuable musical tool is her voice, a flat, lived-in instrument that she uses in a brusk conversational manner that at times recalled Marianne Faithful, but without the bitter edge. Combined with her clunky, shrugging gestures and her concise lyrics, it was as if she was just standing on stage, looking out at troubled souls and saying simply, “Hey, just don’t be a ditz.”