Various Artists: Lilith Fair: A Celebration Of Women In Music

It's amazing how quickly the words "Lilith Fair" went from media shorthand for "women's empowerment" to media shorthand for "pneumatic, white-bread girly music." What acoustic-guitar-wielding woman short of Ani DiFranco doesn't get callously dismissed as a "Lilith Fair type," regardless of whether she actually plays pneumatic, white-bread girly music As the media backlash kicks in, the sophomore letdown awaits, and a thousand knockoffs and competitors get ready to pop up, here's the hokily titled Lilith Fair: A Celebration Of Women In Music, a two-disc, 25-song sampler from last year's lucrative tour. Of course, it's hard to capture the spirit and tone of a summer-long, multi-act festival on two CDs, and A Celebration Of Women In Music's fatal flaw for fans may be that it's democratic to a fault: The shows' featured attractions were big names like festival founder Sarah McLachlan, Indigo Girls, Paula Cole, and Shawn Colvin, but each gets no more than a track or two here. Marquee participants like Fiona Apple and Tracy Chapman are absent altogether, while Jewel is relegated to one song that she shares with McLachlan and Indigo Girls. That leaves a lot of room for a mixed bag of promising performers (Abra Moore, Autour De Lucie) and practitioners of pneumatic, white-bread girly music (Dayna Manning and more), with precious few highlights worth owning. The presence of Emmylou Harris is generally worth the price of admission, but who needed Indigo Girls' self-serious, decidedly un-crowdpleasing "Scooter Boys," an almost embarrassingly flat reading of "Eternal Flame" by The Bangles' Susanna Hoffs, or anything by Meredith Brooks If you're looking for expensive souvenirs, a wide variety of T-shirts will no doubt be made available for purchase at this year's festival.