Alright, Still
What’s perhaps most impressive with Lily Allen’s debut record Alright, Still is that as a saucy twentysomething newcomer to the scene, she is able to tread among all kinds of genres with a smart humility. Alright, Still is a crackling, spunky mix of trumpets, drums and sharp self-effacing irony woven with a strictly cross-genre sensibility. At thirty-eight minutes, it is neither too short nor too long; it makes all the rights points without overstaying its welcome.
The shiniest gem on the album is LDN - a deceivingly sweet ditty wherein Allen sings about the ugly shadows of seemingly pretty, if commonplace, sights she encounters on the streets of London ("LDN" is text-message code for "London".) Sights such as pimps, crackwhores, muggings among other lovely things are nestled in a lush trumpet loop, staying cunningly true to the nature of the song. And this very loop is what makes this song glow apart from the rest of the album.
Knock ’Em Out, Alfie and Everything’s Just Wonderful are even further cases of just how consistent Allen’s penmanship is. Her brilliant, satirical songwriting, underpinned by catchy percussion and ingenious instrumentation gets across rather succinctly such matters as rebuffing advances at bars, setting good examples for your kid brother and the dealing all the drolleries of adulthood -- the last of which is punctuated with such choice lines as "I wanna be able to eat spaghetti bolognaise / and not feel bad about it for days and days and days."
Even Not Big dares to take things a step too far - documenting an ex-lover’s case of overcompensating for his small penis - and pushes those limits with successful aplomb.
And though Alright, Still sparkles and shines on the whole, the last half of the album doesn’t hold up nearly as well as the first half when Allen tries to bring things down a notch. Though still fantastic compositions, there’s a certain shine missing from the bulk of the last half. It suffers under the less-punchy natures of Shame for You and Take What You Take - though that doesn’t say much, because both are still fairly swell pop songs on in their own rights.
American pop music still needs that big bang to ring in the new year and while the Brits have been sitting on Lily Allen for the better part of a year, we’ve still been entertaining some inexplicable love affair with Coldplay. It just might be time to move onto to something far more fetching and exciting. Enter Lily Allen.
by Lily Allen
