Album review: The Weepies' Hideaway

When they released their sparkling debut LP, Say I Am You, in 2006, California folk-pop duo the Weepies were readily embraced by everyone from Snow Patrol, who nominated them for a Shortlist Music Prize, to Mandy Moore, who invited them to collaborate on her album Wild Hope, to soundtrack supervisors for movies and TV shows (including, of course, Grey’s Anatomy). It’s a level of success that, in these ADD-addled days, a young indie-oriented act typically achieves only once. But Hideaway suggests the Weepies’ Deb Talan and Steve Tannen will have us crying with joy for some time to come. The new album is at once mellower and more provocative than Say I Am You, nearly every song a gently jangling, dusky invitation for self-reflection, more winsome than weepy thanks to the pair’s dulcet, dovetailing vocals.

Talan and Tannen, who married in 2007, spent a year on Hideaway, holed up alone together after a wearying promotional stint for Say I Am You; the album wasn't the only benefit of their seclusion — the couple has since had a child. Happy times, to be sure, but the message on Hideaway is that things won’t be great all the time. “Even the stars sometimes fade to gray,” they sing on the title track. Lucky for us, the Weepies aren’t afraid of the dark: “Walk on, walk on, walk on,” they coax on “Can’t Go Back Now.” With Hideaway as a kind of refuge if we need it, some of us might even be able to take their advice.

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(Published April 2008)

Album review: Nellie McKay's Obligatory Villagers

 
Nellie McKay’s new album starts off with laughter — loud, hard laughter, the kind that at first sounds like a good time, until you it dawns on you that, hmmm, maybe whatever these people are laughing at isn’t all that funny. And, of course, a sweetly played song that acidly comments on feminist-haters isn’t funny. That contradiction, which gets you laughing and thinking, thinking and laughing, is what makes Nellie McKay so winning. The confidence with which McKay deploys her prodigious talent makes Obligatory Villagers her best album yet — and one of the best albums of the year.

On her previous two albums, 2004’s Get Away from Me and 2006’s Pretty Little Head, McKay reveled in the tension between lyrics that make biting critiques of the messed-up world we live in and music that hopscotched among the styles of yesteryear: big band, the great jazz songbooks, classic show tunes. Her one nod to modern music was when she rapped on tracks like Get Away's “Sari.” But even then, she subverted the genre, rhyming not about what a superior person she is but about the frustrations of living in a society with questionable values. To paraphrase Sinatra, she ate it up ("it" being popular culture) and spat it out: “Well now, I don’t mean to offend/ Much/ Just comprehend/ When you’re female and you’re fenced in/ And Fen-phen'd to no end.” Those records were heavily praised for their ingenuity and wit — and rightly so — but at times they were a challenging listen. There was so much going on musically that playing these albums straight through felt like flying through McKay’s mind, dodging the synapses as they zipped by.

Obligatory Villagers, on the other hand, is as creatively voracious as McKay’s past efforts but hangs together wonderfully. Her old-fashioned influences are still there, so it's not so much an aesthetic development as McKay simply firming up her approach. “Overture” opens with some brisk trumpet playing, like a number from a Gene Kelly musical. “Politan” is a swaying bossa nova featuring summer-breeze vocals by Nancy Reed and some craggy crooning by Bob Dorough, both of them veteran jazz artists (although Dorough is perhaps best know for Schoolhouse Rock). “Zombie” is a 21st-century “Monster Mash.” But the songs are streamlined and sure, and the lyrics are more clever than ever. “Identity Theft” uses that indignant “Sari”-style rapping to race through a litany of complaints about everything from assimilation to Ivy League schools to Pluto’s demotion from planethood. Witness the kooky wordplay: “Lookin for some kind of closure/ All I’m findin is Ray Bolger.”

Upon the release of her first album, Nellie McKay was hailed as the cat’s meow (even if that cat did hiss at times). But we all know what often happens to the shining faces in those “Ones to Watch” features. With Obligatory Villagers, McKay proves she’s got legs, and she knows how to use them.

(Published December 2007) 

There are probably reasons not to like jazz vocals, but I can't think of one. The lyrics alone kill me (in a good way). Look at "If I Were a Bell" — the chorus is one metaphor for happiness after another: "If I were a gate, I'd be swinging... If I were a watch, I'd start popping my springs... If I were a salad, I know I'd be splashing my dressing." Splashing my dressing? Outlandish! It's like Salvador Dalí wrote the words. Then you figure in the instruments — the horns, which can be mournful or mirthful, the notes from the piano falling gently like raindrops or raising a ruckus. An entire scene can be set just by grazing a drum with brushes. But all of this is simply raw material — a promise that needs to be made good on. Somebody needs to come in and inhabit the words and the music, to make us believe that this is the only way in the world that the tune we're listening to could ever be performed, even if we've heard it before. It's not an easy thing to do, though you would never guess that from the work of these 12 magnificent ladies of jazz.

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My definition of music for Sundays was formed back in 1976. I was nine years old, and my family had not yet left Long Island, New York — where my young parents would host backyard clambakes and my friends and I could ride our bikes to the convenience store to buy supplies for our all-candy picnics — for Orlando, Florida, where the gardens had snakes and among the many chain restaurants was a place called Sambo's. My aunt Diana, who was probably 22 at the time, came by one Sunday afternoon in autumn and took me out for ice cream. It was that amber time of day, when the darkness is not far off and everything becomes intensely hued before going blue-gray and, finally, black. It felt bittersweet. Maybe it was the music Diana, who was as much a big sister as an aunt, was playing. She had a burnt-orange Camaro with a white top and white bucket seats, and the center console contained an 8-track player that was playing a Carpenters tape. Sunday music for me will always be that drive, looking up through the windshield at the crimson-colored trees that bordered our street, a favorite aunt, and the doleful beauty of Karen Carpenter's crystalline voice. Naturally, the album picks here reflect that inclination toward the slightly sad, as filtered through bossa nova, indie pop, blues, R&B, doo-wop, country, and even metal.

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With all due respect to Neil Sedaka, breaking up isn’t just hard to do. It bites big ones. Even if you’re the one who’s ending things, it's still an emotionally exhausting process. Time was, you were happily making mix CDs for your loved one, every song an expression of your true affection, every tune aimed to inspire delight. And now, well, now you’re the one who needs some good music — to get you through the cold, cold night, to articulate your loss, to comfort you, and, after a while, to get you back out there again, because life really is too brief to be pining for what is gone. Each of the albums here can stand on its own as a solid post-breakup companion, though professionals (read: I) advise that you consume them in the order listed. And in your condition, do you really feel like arguing?

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