Lily Allen preview

Lily Allen
Metro, Chicago
Thursday, February 8, 2007

Myspace darling Lily Allen makes her second Chicago appearance since the fall, and this time has an album to back her.

Allen’s appearance Thursday doesn’t mark an occasion so much as did the release of her debut album, Alright, Still, January 30th. The seeds she planted online — much along the lines of the major label draftee/Fluxblog imprimatur Matthew Perpetua — were cultivated in the Internet’s wilderness but have been brought to fruition in the mainstream. She made her name by posting on Myspace, which was until recently considered a way around the industry rigamarole. But the act of burning her to widely distributed media sort of counterdicts her initial appeal: Now that she’s part of the machine, is she as relevant?

Well, in many ways, Lily Allen’s Capitol Records debut signals a success for the minnows, much in the same way doors were opened for bands on indie labels in the Nirvana era. But it also dispels the notion anyone can really exist outside that machine. Alright, Still is almost a repudiation of Internet power, relegating it to minor-league status, at least temporarily. So what do we get with the formalized Allen? At this point it’s hard to tell, because these songs she completed on her own. Stripped of her outlaw context, however, Allen comes off as a digestible brat crossbreed of Lady Sovereign and Gwen Stefani. “Smile” and “Knock ‘Em Out” still deliver on their Paris Hilton-age whims, but the album’s deciding factor isn’t Allen, but her soundtrack. The record’s gentle, TV-commercial ready, tropical bounce buoys her rather inane bouts with being single. Her flow — if you want to call it that — is that of a teenage girl on the phone figuring out how to violate dating norms. There’s no political undercurrent a la M.I.A. or Lady Sov, and her brash Londoner tongue allows her to carry through 2007 without saying a word about 2008. By her count it doesn’t matter. Everyone will be fixated on someone else from some as-of-yet-undiscovered launch pad, and she might as well get hers now.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly