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other Lilys album reviews: BETTER CAN'T MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER |
December 1999 | Amazon.com's Top 100 Editors' Picks Lilys The 3-Way #15 of 100 Amazon.com's Best of 1999 The Lilys' music will instantly remind you of a handful of classic organ- and guitar-heavy combos from the '60s, but they're wholly unlike any other retro outfit on earth. Theirs is an alternate vision of '60s psychedelia. Neither pretentious nor full of itself, the stuff totally rocks, Nuggets-style, in spite of the disjointed lyrics and way-complicated song structures.
Lilys The 3 Way Best New Music Let's ad this mathematically: The 3 Way clocks in at just over 36 minutes. Eleven of those minutes contain five ecstatic blasts of '60s British Invasion guitar riffs, Nuggets-style organ lines, and soaring layered harmonies, in the tradition of the Lily's superb 1996 disc "Better Can't Make Your Life Better". "Dimes Make Dollars" opens the album with a garage band riff, shared among fuzzy guitars and organ, that will tempt you to frug or pony or at least do the hand-jive. "A Tab For The Holiday" ends the album with a very Kinks-like jaunty jingle, complete with what sounds like a banjo and toy piano. The three other two-minute treasures follow suit. Three pace-altering sweet tunes divide another 11 minutes.Brilliant enough. That leaves 14 minutes and they're the kickers: "Socs Hip" and "Leo Ryan (Our Pharoah's Slave)," seven minutes each, are mini-epics of mind-bending construction, chock-full of melodies and ideas that leader Kurt Heasley could have divvied among ten or 12 other songs. Stop-time tango movements, sitars, strings, a horn - anything could appear at any moment, and does. Like those ubiquitous Elephant Six folks, or like recent His Name Is Alive, the Lilys find grin-producing riffs and fragments from the past and recombine and rearrange them into thrilling new equations.
Lilys The 3 Way
April 29, 1999 | Hartford Courant Anyone bemoaning the lack of current by the Kinks kamp need only plug into these splendidly nutty revivalists. The Lilys evoke that same kaleidoscopic burst of melody, harmony, harpsichord and possibility once found in Kinks klassics like "Something Else." The fact that they're doing it 30 years later - in a studio in Hartford no less - makes them somthing akin to pop archaeologists as well. But there's nothing stuffy about "The 3 Way," an album that makes you want to frug and go-go and throw daisies on the wall.The mad genius behind it all is Kurt Heasley, a lanky fellow in a Beatles bob who until recently made his home in West Hartford. With a band that includes producer and engineer Michael Deming of Studio 45 as on of the players, the Lilys go beyond the splash they made last time out, when a track picked up by a TV ad actually made them stars in London.Though they sing with falsettoed English accents, the Lilys sing of classic New England. Indeed, the album begins with a salute to a Berlin Turnpike motel in "Newington City" that makes it sound as exotic as Itchykoo Park.If there's a problem with "The 3 Way," it's that Heasley tries to fit 30 songs into the 10 tracks, with the longer songs almost sounding like medlies. This only means they have too many ideas - a welcome problem in rock these days.
April 1999 | Amazon.com Reviews Amazon.com Thirty-six minutes of recombinant retro bliss, The 3 Way is a keen, direly enjoyable experiment. Replace the wide-eyed optimism of the Elephant Six clan with real and implied decadence, or add cojones to Belle and Sebastian's fey dandyism and voilà!: Lilys. A smart British person wrote about their groundbreaking, delectable 1996 disc, Better Can't Make Your Life Better, that the Lilys sound like every decent '60s band--playing all at once. But these days the group leans more heavily toward the Zombies' organ-savvy pop or the Kinks' high-spirited, melodic bashing. Two ways in which Lilys' music differs crucially from the la-la-la singing, crunching guitar chording, and bouncy bass-playing inspirations of their influences are the song structure and the words. The 3 Way has more changes than 2112; even the short tunes sound like four different ones stitched together. And the lyrics range from wry, Cardinal-esque observations ("Get off on death or don't get off at all") to a call for group nastiness to a drug addict's ode to the pocket mirror he uses to "huff lines until dawn." The last track is a lighthearted, banjo-and-toy-piano-accented skiffle wherein the narrator counsels: "Arriving later than original estimate / Pouring shots while the schedule came and went / Heal yourself till the rescue party's sent / Just keep your mind off your broken neck." --Mike McGonigal
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