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other Lilys album reviews |
Reissue of 1996 album
Kurt Heasley hates SSL mix bus compression with a passion most people reserve for ex-lovers, sleazy lawyers, and particularly obnoxious next-door neighbors. "I can tell you the day the first SSL console tracked an album," he says between puffs on a strange-looking imported Indian cigarette in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library. "That was the day the sound of records became so unlistenable that I went back to all my old records." Heasley, who's spent the past six years as the lone permanent member of a constantly evolving, nomadic pop project called the Lilys, didn't just listen to old records. The tall and lanky 25 year old singer-songwriter-guitarist studied, from the inside out, music that was made during what he refers to as" the golden age of recording," 1955 to 1970. He released three discs of promising, lo-fi, strum-and -drone pop on the indie spinArt label, which put him in league with an emerging scene for Denver-based bands centered around the Apples in Stereo and Neutral Milk Hotel. But is wasn't until he hooked up with Hartford producer-engineer Michael Deming, drummer Thorn Monahan, and bassist Aaron Sperske that Heasley finally got the sound he's been looking for. (He's since added guitarist Torben Pastore and keyboardist Timothy Foote to the Boston-Based Lily's line-up.) The result was Better Can't Make Your Life Better ( Che-Primary) a brisk, hook driven collection of tunes that fuses highlights of the pre-67 Who, Revolver-era Beatles, and the early Kinks into something that sounds like it might have been recorded before Heasley was even conceived, much less born, Imagine a cheerier Oasis propelled by a meaty, beaty, big, and bouncy rhythm section and produced by George Martin on vintage equipment. It's not surprising that Heasley, whom producer Eli Janey (Girls against Boys) once warned to "remember what continent you're on"( "I think that was his version of saying we were too English"), ended up signing to the British label Che. But even Heasley was mildly shocked to find that Better Can't Make Your Life Better would be coming out in the U.S. on Che's new American partner, the young Elektra imprint Primary. It's a development that may put the Lilys in a position to do like the Beatles and push beyond psychedelic pop to, as Heasley eagerly puts it," a more orchestrated and composed approach." Not that he's very likely to lose sight of the little things that sparked his love for 60's pop in the first place. "I have nothing but the greatest amount of respect," Heasley emphasizes, "for anyone who will patiently move a microphone around a drum set to get the right sound."
October 18, 1996 | Washington Post The intro to "Cambridge California," the first song on Lilys' "Better Can't Make Your Life Better" could be hardly anything other than the Kinks, circa 1964. Yet this stylistically and geographically peripatetic quintet (once of D.C., currently of Boston) is not leading the latest revival of the British Invasion. "Better" does owe more to the mid-'60s than do previous Lilys discs, which drew heavily on the neopsychedelic sounds of late-'80s Britain. But singer-songwriter Kurt Heasley (the only perennial Lily) combines divergent ingredients with an authority that transcends mere revivalism. Perhaps most impressive is "Paz en el Hogar," which opens in the Doors' "Soul Kitchen," enlists a vocal arrangement from the Association, then plays up its Latin lilt by turning into a Spanish-language samba, only to end in a bit of jet-whoosh that suggests the 1965 Byrds. Nearly as sweeping are such tracks as "Shovel Into Spade Kit," which mates the Kinks with orchestral doodles. Such hybrids would be impossible without their models, but what's most impressive about "Better" is not how Lilys reproduce the sound of '60s rock -- it's how they revitalize its spirit. -By Mark Jenkins |
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