All too often on Spy, the small, significant personal questions that the songwriter is capable of asking are obscured by a lascivious "Does she or doesn't she?" Even the Rolling Stones-style backup vocals on the catchy "Pure Sin" can't rescue its central oxymoron from tedium, because the extremes simply aren't that interesting. Though Simon's not the artistic wallflower she presents in "Memorial Day" …, she's no rakish hot mama either. Indeed, the dreary mock twang of "Coming to Get You" reminds me of academicians who write in dialect.

All of this cartoons-for-adults posturing doesn't disguise the fact Simon gives away very little of herself on Spy. She's always been of two minds about exposure: a confessional singer with patrician reticence. Her best songs, from "No Secrets" to "In Times When My Head" (and the new record's gem, "We're So Close"), have transmuted and exploited this conflict, simultaneously serving as...