When I listen to Saffire - the Uppity Blues Women, I automatically think of classic blues legend Alberta Hunter, a spitfire who infused her music with wit and sass, becoming perhaps the first embodiment of musical feminism.

On the group's farewell CD -- Gaye Adegbalola, Ann Rabson, and Andra Faye are setting off on solo careers -- Saffire channels Hunter and bring an in-your-face, take-no-guff attitude to powerful and intensely personal subjects, so much so that listeners -- especially men -- might squirm a little listening to it. On "Too Much Butt," Faye opines clothing stores' inability to sell jeans that fit larger, aging women, while on "Nothin' in Your House," Rabson sums up the band's spirit: "I'd rather be hated for who I am/Than loved for what I'm not."

The CD's best songs, though, are Adegbalola's; on "Bald Eagle," for example, she gleefully and proudly declares her love for the woman in her life. The most powerful cut on the disc is "Bald Headed Blues," her cathartic, raw but eventually triumphant description of the ravages of cancer -- and the torture used to treat it: "I didn't battle cancer, you know it battled me/Oh, but it did not win/I'm still standing, don't you see?"