IRONIC, DON'TCHA THINK?

By RICHARD CORLISS

They soldier on, making their sweet piercing music, enjoying decent careers and, every couple of years, releasing a CD that enriches the pop-music vocabulary. Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin are close to the best there is in today's bounty of singer-songwriters. But hovering above them, like a gargantuan nightmare kid sister, is the brutal fact of Alanis Morissette, whose primal whining has moved 15 million copies of her first album. It must be a perplexity for Carpenter, whose songs have cannier pop hooks, and for Colvin, whose angst-filled anthems predated and surpassed Morissette's--though she's too polite to scream them.

On A Few Small Repairs (Columbia), Colvin meets the Zeitgeist halfway. The harmonica, the assertive fuzz guitar, the typeface of the lyric sheet are all Morissettish. And if that cozens people to give her CD a necessary second listen, it will be a smart move for both Colvin and her new audience. What's crucial is that the voice hasn't changed; instead of Morissette's sandpaper, Colvin has a silky sound that she wears like sackcloth to suit her pretty dirges. These songs, most of which she wrote with her producer, John Leventhal, still have the swank and cutting edge of Colvin's legendary cheekbones.

"It's time for a few small repairs," says the heroine of the opening song, Sunny Came Home: a lost soul returns home, gathers up the kids and sets the place on fire, as the suave, singalong chorus offers the musical equivalent of God's unmeddling sympathy. The narrator in Suicide Alley, a nihilist's jaunty march, shares Sunny's glums: "I wasn't born, I was spat out at a wall...on the corner of First and Insane." In If I Were Brave, Colvin brings the alienation home, to the singer on the stage, "a clown to entertain the happy couples." But these open wounds are swathed in lovely melodies. Colvin may feel isolated in her art, but her CD has the breakthrough goods. She won't be too hip for the big room much longer.

Carpenter could be the jolliest A student at a Seven Sisters college. For A Place in the World (Columbia) she's written tunes that are instantly likable--so shoot her--and reminiscent of early Beatles or rollicking Motown. But she twists the old feelings even as she exploits them. The perky beat and ersatz-inane lyrics of I Want to Be Your Girlfriend tell you that even for mature women in the '90s, love can feel like a teen crush, pulsing to a Buddy Holly-style jingle.

Carpenter dares to dream small, in songs about childhood, first love and the imminence of middle age. In Hero in Your Own Hometown, kids who "played house down in the bomb shelter,/ Suffered through the wonder years" are now grown up, warily eyeing that time in the near distance "When the road not taken disappears/ Into the path of least resistance."

At her best, Carpenter paints moods. What If We Went to Italy is a seductive lilt about a lazing lover's itinerary. In Ideas Are Like Stars, inspired by artist Joseph Cornell, she considers, with a child's severe wonder, the expanse of the human intellect. Ideas "teach you to fly without wires or thread/ They promise if only you'd let them." The music is a lovely droning that sounds like signals from a sympathetic galaxy. The majestic center of Carpenter's strongest album yet, the song reminds us of the universe of emotions--and ideas--that artists like Carpenter and Colvin can summon. Alanis Morissette ain't quite there yet.

--By Richard Corliss