Released in 2003,
Career Suicide saw
Lennon trade in her Marshall stacks for a piano and a string section, marking her first foray into singer/songwriter land. It was an uneven but promising move, exposing both her strengths and weaknesses and the Band-Aids she often uses to cover both of them up. On
Damaged Goods the heavy metal siren brings the band back in, turns it up to 11 sometimes, and delivers the kind of pseudo-gothic modern rock that won her opening slots for
Alice Cooper and
Monster Magnet, as well as a coveted spot on the Warped Tour. At her best,
Lennon Murphy deftly balances the rage and innocence of early
Tori Amos with
Alanis Morissette, and songs like "No One Knows," "My Sins," and "Just One" find the perfect middle ground between the post-teen pop of
Avril Lavigne and the pasty-faced gloom of
Evanescence, but the majority of this unnecessarily long (17 tracks) exercise in alternative metal schizophrenia feels about as fresh as the term "riot grrl."