Nellie McKay is awful because she's cute-- gratingly cute, the cutest drama chick in high school, just 19 years old and already writing sharper tunes than, well, most girls her age who write pop songs. Then there's that 1950s-era kitsch cover photo of McKay wearing an adorable red coat that matches her lipstick, and orchestral arrangements that circle her piano with sweet pippy strings and flute tweets. She swoons, she yells, and she even raps, though that's not as bad as when she cops an accent like Astrud Gilberto's. And when the lyrics get political and she tut-tuts George W. Bush... man, this record's annoying.
But McKay is also great because she's cute. She sings about her kitty and she even acts like one herself, baring her claws because she can pretend she doesn't know how to use them. Every potentially annoying turn of phrase is like a secret ingredient that drives her songs into your skull. For example, she doesn't sing about a clone-- it's a clonie. And how retro is it to use a fizzy sound effect when she sings about pouring a drink?
McKay's the latest in the recent wave of NPR-friendly young women who like to sing with their clothes on. If you consider Norah Jones to be the leader of this pack and Joss Stone the one who just plain works the hardest, then that makes McKay the maverick. Clever enough to flit across a broad pastiche instead of coasting by on jazz ballads, McKay can also be just edgy enough-- she swears but she's no sailor-- and she throws out barbs more to disrupt herself than her audience.
Take the lyrics, which are both shallow and unfathomable. When other teens are singing about boys, McKay only seems to know men in their 40s, ones who spend more time lecturing her about jazz than breaking her heart. McKay also has plenty of bile for the ladies, making fun of suburban housewives even while she acts scared that she'll become one. Either way, a line like, " I want to get married/ That's why I was born," is the kind of teenage smarm that you get from people who are too young to make those mistakes.
"Won't U Please B Nice" is a flawless satire of a money-hungry wife-cum-femme-fatale-- until the bridge makes a distracting (and outdated) N'Sync joke. And in case you were lulled by the closing ballad, "Really", she breaks the mood with a snap about a "yuppie fuck." The only time it sounds like something is at stake is when she finally turns the bile on herself, like the self-doubt in "Sari"-- on which she's spitting mad at herself and the world-- or "Change the World", where she's honest about how trivial life's big questions sound when they're filtered through teenage white guilt. When she sings, "Am I hetero or queer?", it isn't t.A.T.u.-like tantalization, but idle speculation.
If McKay can't make up her mind about herself, that also suits the music, which is a mess of jazz, pop, and easy listening. At their most obvious, the arrangements sound like a 1970s variety show, and you can picture a fiddler on a hoe-down set for "It's a Pose", or a cardboard NYC skyline wheeled out for "Manhattan Avenue". But under all of that, McKay brings the goods. Her graceful melodies, barbed hooks, and confident voice take command on the itchingly catchy "Ding Dong" and "The Suitcase Song", on which she proves how smoothly she can tickle the ivory, what a warm massage her vocals can become, and how seductive she might someday sound.
With better lyrics and a longer attention span, McKay would be a jaw-dropping songwriter, but it's difficult to get sucked into a song if you don't connect with the singer. McKay can't decide whether she'll grow up to be Dorothy Parker or Holly Golightly, and by splitting the difference, she only catches the funny parts of either. Next time she'll need to give us more depth, to sustain us when the cute wears off.
