Back in 1993, Liz Phair released her justly celebrated debut album, Exile in Guyville, a feminist landmark double LP that rocked out without raising its voice and navigated the treacherously boy-centric world of indie-rock with sexualized swagger and poignant vulnerability.

Nobody's quite figured out how it allegedly works as a song-by-song reply to the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street, but Phair's Exile - which she will perform in its entirety at the Theater of Living Arts on Wednesday - stands on its own as one of the great albums of its era, even as it set an impossibly high standard that the Chicago singer and guitarist has never come close to equaling.

It also landed Phair on the cover of Rolling Stone and vaulted her to the top of the mid-'90s "Women in Rock" class, a ghettoizing categorization that seemed paternalistic at the time, but in retrospect refers to an era that sounds like a mini-golden age for tough-minded female rockers, from L7 to Courtney Love to PJ Harvey.

Though they didn't gain much national attention at the time, one Philadelphia-area rock-chick band of the era whose music also has stood up quite nicely, thank you, was the Friggs, the all-girl foursome led in various incarnations by the formidable Palmyra Delran. As demonstrated by the new collection Today Is Tomorrow's Yesterday, on the Get Hip label, the Friggs were a trashy, slightly surfy, garage-rock band that never had to try too hard to be cool. It came naturally.

The Friggs, who will play a reunion show at Sugartown at Tritone on Saturday, are one of those bands that you've probably heard even though you don't think you have. Their song "Shake" turned up in Superbad, and the excellent, and excellently titled, "Bad Word for a Good Thing," is featured in a long-running Chevrolet Trailblazer TV commercial. On Saturday, expect to hear those, plus selections from Delran's forthcoming solo EP, She Digs the Ride, and, we hope, her post-Friggs band, the Santa Marias.

- Dan DeLuca

Liz Phair, at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Theater of Living Arts, 334 South St. Tickets: $25. Information: 215-922-1011 or www.livenation.com.