Is Nellie McKay losing her edge, or is she just feeling blue? Just a few short years after her debut, which she recorded as a precociously talented and knowing young woman, she sounds a bit weary on her fifth full-length, the scattered and distracted Home Sweet Mobile Home. It may be her most intensely, intently melancholy album yet, which actually sounds promising: Under her perky persona McKay has always hidden a prickly disposition, and the witty dissonance between her wry lyrics and her spry, eclectic music implied a gleefully subversive mission. In that regard, she's always been as much an acolyte of Randy Newman as of Doris Day, despite fêting the latter on last year's solid covers album, Normal as Blueberry Pie.
On Home Sweet Mobile Home, however, she hits that balance like it's an obligatory stance, such that these songs sound best when she's at her most miserable and lags whenever she breaks her funk for another genre foray. The opening track introduces the album's rainy-day tone: "Bruise on the Sky" is a melancholy rumination on depression, as she mistakes dark clouds for rainbows. On the bridge McKay sounds like she might even be addressing her younger self: "I used to think about it, and by 'think' I mean 'satirize.'" The "it" she's talking about-- lost loves? unspoken regrets? bad politics?-- is left intentionally vague, but the overcast dejection in her voice conveys the specificity of her emotional state if not her predicament, and even rhyming "follow" with "Charo" can't cheer her up.
As a songwriter, McKay's mischievous sensibility has always been her greatest asset, and the smarty-pants songs on Home Sweet Mobile Home allude not only to the cuchi-cuchi of the Spanish-American actress but also to Mussolini and the French Revolution. McKay wields a sharp wit and deep knowledge of 20th-century pop culture, which certainly enlivens the album, yet her vocals often fail these songs, sounding somewhat distant and detached-- either too cool or too blue. The hiccups at the end of "Dispossessed" sound rehearsed, and "¡Bodega!" sounds like a nervous dress rehearsal. It's as if [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| the melancholy of "Bruise on the Sky" and the lovely lament "Coosada Blues" has pervaded every song, with little regard for whether it demands that tone.
McKay is just as eclectic musically as she is lyrically, with forays into reggae ("Caribbean Time") and New Orleans jazz ("Dispossessed") along with asides to dinner theater and merengue. In the past, such genre excursions have commented cleverly on her lyrics, but too often these trappings sound like errand running-- obligatory and largely uninteresting, with few specifics to color the settings as uniquely McKay. While the lite-disco funk of "No Equality" suits her just fine, the arrangements on "Caribbean Time" and "Unknown Reggae" might sound right at home on Willie Nelson's failed reggae album from 2005-- or anyone's failed reggae album for that matter. The end result is an album that sounds believably, prevasively downhearted, nodding to our expectations of Nellie McKay even if the woman herself no longer sounds like she believes them.
