Lily Frost Brings Her Catchy, Edgy, Eclectic Chamber Pop to NYC

Canadian art-rock/chamber pop songwriter Lily Frost comes to Zirzamin for an early show at 7 PM on Feb 27, which promises to be a treat in that club’s intimate, sonically immaculate Blue Velvet space. She’s got a new album out, Do What You Love, which blends her eclectic purist pop intelligence with nonchalantly alluring vocals and the lyrical wit that flows through her work. Frost got her start in the oldtimey movement in the 90s – her band the Colorifics were sort of the Canadian Squirrel Nut Zuppers. After that she took a turn into retro Americana and has since branched out into darker, more ornate sounds with both jazz and classical tinges. An excellent career retrospective of sorts, with songs from most of her albums, is streaming at her Soundcloud page.

Frost has a disarming directness and bite that often contrasts with her tunes’ lively charm, in full effect on the album’s opening track, Background Radio, with its quirky surrealism, tricky tempo and upbeat ba-ba chamber-pop hooks. The second track, I’m on Fire, reaches back pensively toward oldtimey swing, sort of a cross between Jodi Shaw and Rachelle Garniez. The bouncy, mandolin-spiced title track reminds of another first-class Canadienne, Michal the Girl. Frost follows that with the understatedly snarling Grenade, a terse, noir cabaret-flavored kiss-off note.

Poetry – as in “you used to write me poetry” – sounds like ELO doing Sam Cooke over a trip-hop beat. Frost then takes a brightly pulsing turn toward early 60s Nashville pop with No Promises and its twangy Chris Isaak guitar, then follows it with the catchy but restless Long Sweet Ride and its coy Phil Spector allusions.

Opening with just a steady electric guitar strum and vocals, It Shines is the most nebulous of the tracks here and works a distant ominousness that rises even higher with the creepy gothic trip-hop of Stand. Frost reverts to jaunty mode to close the album with a cover of Pink Floyd’s St. Tropez that’s so breezy it’s funny: she absolutely nails Roger Waters’ brightly beachy sarcasm with an irrepressible grin that he only could have dreamed of. That Frost would have both the chops and the wit to do something like this speaks volumes about where she’s been, where she’s capable of going and how much fun she has doing it.

Haunting Lyrical Intensity from Jodi Shaw

Songwriter Jodi Shaw’s chamber-pop song cycle, In Waterland, is being re-released mid-month. By “song cycle,” that is to say theme and variations; forty years ago, people used to call these things concept albums. The obvious comparison is Aimee Mann, both in terms of brooding, wounded persona and purist, artsy pop sensibility. Shaw plays the album release show on May 15 at 7 PM at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe: if smart, biting, literate lyrics, catchy tunes and unselfconsciously attractive vocals are your thing, you should go see her.

The arrangements manage to be stately and often majestic yet very simple, just Shaw’s piano and nuanced vocals along with terse string arrangements, shimmering guitar atmospherics and occasional low-key rhythm. Swimming is the central motif here, and it’s traumatic. It’s not known whether Shaw – pictured in a bathing cap, in water up to her neck on the album cover – is the strong but fading, emotionally depleted swimmer in the album’s harrowing title track, or whether she has other feelings for the water. That’s a major part of the album’s appeal.

The opening cut, simply titled Swim, sets the tone, the blithe bounce of the melody ultimately unable to conceal the hopelessness of the lyric, sharks circling as a “sound and steady ship” departs, promising to return someday to rescue the woman in the water. Cruelly surreal and evocative, The Witch (not the Sonics song, or the one by Donovan for that matter) pictures a former beauty all alone and facing a hostile, clueless crowd of conformists who’d gladly burn her as their forefathers would have done three hundred years ago. Jack and Jill takes a hypnotic post-Velvets melody and spices it up with piano and some watery tremolo guitar: Shaw’s perplexed narrator can’t figure out why the guy let go of the girl’s hand after the two had successfully made it down the hill.

The torchy Mystery of Love comes as a surprise, with its jaunty gypsy/cabaret vibe and a lyric that starts out seductive and turns unexpectedly menacing. The downward trajectory picks up steam with the swinging, bucolic To the Country (We Go), a late 60s-style psychedelic pop number that again shifts from blithe to bleak: “A soft rain falls on my blouse, and now there is no doubt I see Gallows Hill in that house,” Shaw announces quietly as ebow guitar oscillates hypnotically behind her. This Balloon (Ode to Zvezdochka) intermingles images of planes and trains with an exasperated anger over lush minor-key orchestration: it’s both the most classically-oriented and Aimee Mann-esque cut here. Then all the foreshadowing explodes with the kiss-off anthem Fortunate Prince, a violent tale cached in an elegant arrangement. After the bloodshed runs its course, the narrator muses on what she might say if and when she reaches the afterlife: “There was something exciting about him when he was alive.” And then despair settles in with the understated but towering intensity of the title track.

Hell’s Bells – not the song you’re thinking of – shifts from a precise tiptoeing hip-hop beat to a lush sway, a bitter chronicle of failure with neatly intricate layers of twin vocals a la David J’s Stop This City as it winds out. But as the album comes full circle, she’s ready for the breakup guy, and the deadpan sarcasm is deadly. The album’s concluding cut is a somewhat more brisk solo piano version of the title track, which is just as good as the studio take. It’s a quiet, relentlessly intense masterpiece. The audience for this is potentially vast: any morose indie film whose music director might be contemplating something by Aimee Mann, or for that matter Feist or Neko Case, also ought to have Jodi Shaw as part of the soundtrack.