Obi Best
Capades
Social Science Recordings
By Jose Fritz
What an odd girl Alex Lilly is. Lanky, scrawny, and pale, her knobby shoulders poke out through anything she could choose to cover them with. It seems appropriate that she be singing light, spacey pop songs, but not expected that the lyrics would be so good. But as Abigail Fischer once wrote, “I am he as you are she as you are me.” From the unassuming can only come surprises.
She makes sense in a student apartment off Washington Square, wedged in tightly with a Korg and a Hammond between two mismatched futon couches that double as beds for NYU dropouts. The room sports a couple pairs of broken headphones, the art student stink of stems, resin, and Falafel. Alex of course is based in Los Angeles but I think the metaphor still stands. The obtuse cover art reinforced my assessment: three cloaked figured hugging her like a compressed conga line of stuffed bed sheets. It probably means something to sprightly art students, but it’s lost on this grizzled music critic.
When Angel Deradoorian took a break from the Dirty Projectors, the music that came fourth was surprising; songs like “Grey Teeth” were completely outside the realm of possibility. In a similar respect, Lilly has elapsed anything you could have expected of The Bird and the Bee. Her work for them as a backup singer hinted at no aspirations beyond the liner notes.
Her band is an A-list of unknowns: Bram Inscore from the synth-pop band B.R.A.M., Erik Klass who’s played drums for the Weepies, Sun Engine and Jabber Jaw, Barbara Gruska from Hours of Shipwreck, and even Kim Talon of Eagle & Talon. In truth, not one of these bands sounds a damn thing like Obi Best. The album lands somewhere between Feist and a ‘80s remix of Nellie McKay.
Instead of being cute, she’s clever. Instead of being whimsical, she’s eccentric. She evades the girl-pop foiles of Danielle Ate the Sandwich and the tarty quirkiness of Katy Perry. From start to finish the record is idiosyncratic. From wispy pop-ballads like “Who Loves You Now” to the ‘80s pop of ‘Swedish Boy,” to the coy “It’s Because of People Like You” she remains inscrutable. Her moderate vocal similarity to Inara Gorge is made irrelevant by a wholly different take on composition. The songs are much more self aware. One in particular “Green and White Stripes” reads like metatext for the rest of the album.
“You can read between the lines / but it’s only notes and dots and rhymes /
It's only music-music / truth, it brings no consequence /
So you might as well stop making sense”
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