by Daniel Erenberg

“Not Fair,” the third track on Lily Allen’s new album, represents everything that is great about her as an artist. It’s a break-up song about a guy who is perfect in every way, with the apparently massive exception that he’s terrible in bed. The lyrics are cutting and laugh-out-loud funny, calling attention to those aspects of relationships that no one really talks about aloud. And, importantly, Allen never comes across mean or unreasonable. She’s just unsatisfied and just about ready to call it quits. Meanwhile, the music, co-composed by Greg Kurstin, half of the pop duo The Bird & the Bee, is an exhilarating cut-time jig, punctuated by spaghetti-western guitar bends and mechanical drumming. The best verse I’ve heard this year so far must be: “Oh I lie here in the wet patch/ In the middle of the bed/ I’m feeling pretty damn hard done by/ I spent ages giving head/ Then I remember all the nice things that you ever said to me/ Maybe I’m just overreacting, maybe you’re the one for me.”

When Allen concentrates on marrying these sharp personal narratives to innovative pop music, she’s absolutely brilliant. But, on It’s Not Me, It’s You, Allen is feeling a bit headier than last time out. She’s worried about fame and drugs and George W. Bush and religion. And that’s where the album has huge faults. The worst offender is “Him,” one of those “What if God was one of us” rants that pop stars always think will be a profound statement, but come out sounding like total bullshit (“Do you think he’d drive in his car without insurance/ Now is he interesting or do you think he’d bore us?”). There’s even a few sentiments cribbed from the Bright Eyes rant “When The President Talks to God.” Allen has her own Bush rant on this record, entitled “Fuck You.” Musically, it’s one of the more interesting tracks on the album, with its ironically sunny piano part and bombastic chorus. When Allen gets down to the chorus, devolving into a passionate “Fuck you very, very much,” the song becomes one of the best things she’s written, but the lyrics in the verses are the typical musings of someone who has learned everything he or she knows about politics from The Daily Show (“So you say it’s not OK to be gay, well I think you’re evil”).

Finally, while Kurstin’s musical choices are usually exhilarating (as on the club-friendly “Everyone’s At It” or the polka of “Never Gonna Happen”) he too often succumbs to a mainstream radio-friendly sheen that doesn’t service the songs in the same way that Mark Ronson’s experimental pop of Allen’s first record did. “I Could Say” and “Who’d Have Known” are flat-out boring, and Lily Allen albums should be anything but boring. But, when this album reaches its heights, it’s about as great as mainstream pop music can be. “Not Fair” is my anthem of the year so far and, I suspect, shall remain so for months to come.

B

Tags: lily allen pop music greg kurstin
February 17, 2009 at 6:29pm ∞