Variations on the quirky girly-girl pop archetype (Feist, Nellie McKay, Regina Spektor, St. Vincent, Lavender Diamond) have flourished over the past half-decade, proving the market for inventive post-modernizations of Connie Francis, Patti Page, and the Maguire Sisters. Alex Lilly, backup singer for Blue Note pop-traditionalists the Bird and the Bee, has been playing her brand of supper-club chamber-pop around L.A. for the past few years, much of which is gathered here on Capades, her formal LP debut. It's mannered but not quite meticulous, sometimes hammy and occasionally subversively catchy, but always precious: the name Obi Best did emerge from her shorthand for "oh, be your best."
While Capades doesn't rise to the level of the RIYLs that opened this review, Lilly's update of starry-eyed-and-lovelorn-- little songs, mostly written around simple piano figures-- never get too weighty, but still manage a bit of rewarding variation. She works in two registers, mainly: first is the airy, synth-based romantic rumination. "Blooms Like Flowers" is a feather-light meditation on time-- the object of the song seems to have endless gardens of it. Earlier, when trying to explain another ineffable feeling in the same style, she can only say it's "like green and white stripes." "Who Loves You Now" isn't as forceful as its title might indicate (the lyric "I'll say anything to be close to you" underscores that). It's just an honest question asked politely amidst tinkling piano, drum machine, miniature firework sfx, and overdubbed "doo-doo" vocables, all of which expands into a shimmering refrain.
Lilly's voice is the main attraction on these songs, shifting slightly but effectively between coy low-profile and mannered theatricality. Her more direct and proactive second mode-- more in tune with an early-1990s "Buzz Bin" mode of punchy femininity (Letters to Cleo, anyone?)-- emphasizes these shifts well. "What It's Not" is buoyed by a Spoon-like left-handed piano and off-kilter rhythm before collapsing into a chorus packed with desperation and anxiety. Swinging opener "Nothing Can Come Between Us" sounds like the work of a teenager who's gotten really good at her piano lessons, and makes a compelling case for sticking it out in a relationship, only this time without panicking. "It's Because of People Like You" offsets its frustrating origin-- a mean note pinched in Lilly's wiper blade-- with a positively geeky organ and a refrain that's not necessarily going to instigate a fistfight: "One more person tries to show me their faulty logic, god help me/ I will lend them brains to borrow."
More than anything, Lilly's long-in-the-works debut shows that she's able to express adult hopes and fears with a sense of little-girl wonder and, for the most part, resist the urge to get too darling on us. The songs that don't work as well, then, are those that tend too much toward the cheek-clenchingly girly: "Swedish Boy" skips along like a 10-year-old with a crush on Jens Lekman, scribbling with crayons on staff paper, "It seems to me you live in a made-up country." "Origami"-- with naïve lyrics like "Paper cranes and daisies say I love you," and a sluggish groove in lieu of a sunny melody-- feels out of place. But coming to terms with one's childhood and learning from it is all part of growing up, right? Let's hope that a natural part of Lilly's artistic maturation involves shedding these residual bits of her youth and expanding on her far more engaging approach to adult matters.
