I have a weakness for female singers (as in Rilo Kiley, the Cardigans, Brazilian Girls, and the Dixie Chicks, to name a very few), and for female British singers especially. So I was very pleasantly surprised to come home on Saturday night in time to catch Lily Allen (whom I had never heard of) perform “Smile” and “LDN” on “Saturday Night Live.”
Some investigating on Sunday revealed that her debut album, “Alright, Still,” came out last week, and I was just intrigued enough to buy it.
The album isn’t perfect, and a couple of songs are unbearable — “Take What You Take,” for instance, sounds a bit too Spice Girls — but it’s a pop album, so standards must be adjusted accordingly. The best songs, by far, are the two she performed on Saturday, but “Everything’s Just Wonderful” and “Not Big” are secondary favorites.
On the whole, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like if you want to hear what Leslie Feist would sound like if she covered the Streets (as in the breakup song “Not Big”: “I could see it in your face when you give it to me gentle / Yeah, you really must think you’re great / Let’s see how you feel in a couple of weeks / When I work my way through your mates”).
Most of the songs follow a similar vein, with nasty or depressing words accompanied by totally uplifting pop music. Or, as she seems to explain it on “LDN,” “When you look with your eyes / Everything seems nice / But if you look twice / you can see it’s all lies.” There’s a disarming sweetness about it, to the extent that it’s hard to imagine even her scorned lovers (or the lovers by whom she’s been scorned) holding much of a grudge over her repeated and very personal indiscretions. It’s good enough that I can forgive her for spelling “all right” as one word in the title.
(Having written this, I now see that she has sold out her Feb. 16 show in Washington and been nominated for a whole raft of awards, so I guess she’s well known. Oh well. This is not a news-breaking website.)