Born and raised in the pocket-sized college town of Newark, Delaware, about as far as you can get from the other Newark, Katie Dill and Sam Nobles make sweet music together as Mean Lady. Even though the pastel crocheted album art, Dill's flower tiaras and bindis, and firm belief in smiling at strangers can sometimes be too sweet, it's a little, well, mean to hate on a band that likes to spontaneously play music for homeless subway riders. Mean Lady's debut full-length, Love Now, the duo's first for Fat Possum, usually manages to transcend first impressions. Despite the inevitable baggage that comes with being a boy-girl indie-pop duo, Love Now is more than the sum of its small-town parts.
First, let's get the Zooey Deschanel comparisons out of the way, because Dill plays the ukulele and hula-hoops and describes herself on her Facebook page as "music and art and giggles." She even called it herself, citing She & Him as an influence insofar as "M. Ward producing a record and Zooey being a singer," a polite way of saying that's where the similarities end. Deschanel and Dill both occupy the contralto spectrum and their bands share ambiguous eye contact onstage, but the closest Mean Lady comes to any of the Volumes is probably "I Will Marry You", which floats a simple promise on a nuptial bed of crickets and banjos. If anything, Love Now draws more from Amber Coffman and Dave Longstreth's discordant chemistry, or even the dreamy dub of Peaking Lights, than She & Him's retro jingles. (That exotic sound can also be traced to Dill and Nobles' stint in the tropicalia-inflected five-piece Diego Paulo before they formed Mean Lady.)
Though Dill's vocal pitches bear uncanny resemblance to Coffman's and the house-of-mirrors delay on "Why'd'ya Haftabee Sucha" could be an outtake from Lucifer in Dub, most of Mean Lady's material fits a completely different two-person mold. Dill has said the album can be divided into three-ish-song sets, each a variation on a theme. The "theme" is just Nobles arranging piano chords and Dill adding her voice, a couple of instrumental effects, and an intro, but somehow it doesn't feel repetitive; in fact, Love Now's best songs are the ones that stick to that formula. "Far Away" opens with sleigh bells and a single-note harmony, like an om, before joyously diving into sticky, sitar-driven handclaps. "Bop Bop" takes a bit longer to get there, but its opening dual guitars are almost a better platform for Dill's voice than the following synthesizer flourishes.
It's when Mean Lady experiment that Love Now tends to falter. "Haftabee" is an admirable exercise in dub, even if it sounds like a misguided mash-up of Ella Fitzgerald and King Tubby, but the nine-minute "Pony Ony O" is just a drag. The song's title is cloying enough before it rhymes with "Honey, you're the best best best best honey, don't you know" or "Why am I cry-crying… O" (in that case, the stuttering mimics hiccupping sobs, which is pretty clever in theory, if not in execution). They're outliers on an otherwise cohesive album, which is itself part of the problem: Mean Lady's tried-and-true methods are so simple they might not sound as fresh on the next album. If Dill and Nobles have trouble when they try to grow as a band, they might want to revisit those building blocks.
But why do I have to be such a mean lady? After all, Dill and Nobles play music to make people happy, and Love Now shows that. It's a confident debut of "nice music played and sung by a goofy lady" and her partner, and an appropriately breezy, wistful album for the summer. And for now, that's enough.
