This is just too cool...McKay's metier is basically a sort of fusion between vocal jazz and pop, but to describe her music in those terms doesn't do it justice; in particular, it doesn't give a sense of how many other influences work their way into the mix, nor of how stylistically diverse yet coherent the resultant melange is, nor how quirky, nor how independent-minded and unique - nor, for that matter, how delightful. McKay sings in a wry, expressive alto and has a full cupboard of different vocal styles - lower register conversational slides, honey-throated crooning, Birkin/Hardy-styled twee-isms, girlish shrieks, breathy sighs, sudden shouted expostulations - and an array of tricks to decorate her singing, involving fey layering, pretty harmonies, odd echoes and unanticipated emphases, to name just a few. Primary instrument is piano, but it never dominates, and there's a bit of a kitchen sink ethos at work, meaning that organ, electric keyboards, bass, various types of programmed tones and squiggles, and all kinds of percussion also bob up. I'm not good at deciphering lyrics, but what I've picked up (rhyming 'you' with 'status q', or 'Baudelaire' with 'millionaire', and generally giving off an air of fashionable disenchantment) suggests that a lyric sheet would be worth seeing.
Sometimes she plays it relatively straight and smooth (as on "Long and Lazy River"), and she doesn't mind singing a bit of the blues (particularly on "I Am Nothing", which gets a torch vibe happening), but the highlights come when she is most determinedly treading her own path. To pick out a handful of these:
- "Cupcake". A real charmer to open with, a swooping, irresistibly catchy thing in which all of McKay's glorious eccentricity is on full display.
- "There You Are In Me". Scurrying verse, commandingly chanted chorus; hella cool.
- "The Big One". Breaking out the hip hop/electric guitar drama. How this works with the pre-existing vocal jazz/pop thing is anyone's guess.
- "Bee Charmer". Cyndi Lauper duets on this one, and it's a real good 'un - one of those gloriously light pop songs whose chorus always takes you a bit by surprise and hits you hard in the back of the head.
- "Real Life". At full-pelt.
- "We Had It Right". On which k.d. lang pops up - a jaunty, rather lovely ditty in which light jazz meets twee electro-pop.
Apparently the deal is that McKay has had a falling-out with her record company over the release of Pretty Little Head - the company wanted to release this truncated (and hence presumably more commercial) version of the record while McKay was holding out for her original, longer cut - so I don't know when, if ever, it'll hit the stores here. More information and the advance version here.
