GENRE | MELODIC EXPERIMENTAL ROCK
VERDICT | INSPIRATION FOR INTERIOR DECORATORS
LABEL | ARTS & CRAFTS
If you like the new St. Vincent album, it’s time you listen to Lowell. Her new EP is a sassy battle between her, Marnie Stern, and Moya to see who gets to rule to playground, but the music is far beyond elementary. It’s teenager struggling to come to terms with growing up.
Despite the very Massachusetts name, Lowell comes straight out of Toronto with I Killed Sara V., her solo debut. The bold, restyled pop relies on melodies and forward bass to showcase Lowell’s bright vocals. The comparisons are easy to make with musicians like Annie Clark, Lykke Li, and Santigold doing the same, but none sound similar in their execution. Lowell has an innocence to her that implies hesitance, emphasized by poor enunciation although the finality and structure of her work quickly swats that away.
Prior to this, Lowell teamed up with fancy supergroup ditty Apparatjik—producer Martin Terefe and members of Coldplay, Mew, and A-ha—who helped her out with her first mini-album, If You Can, Solve This Jumble. That friendship no doubt exposed the Canadian singer to a new world of looking at music considering the range between Coldplay’s knowledge of how to structure a hit and Mew’s indie prog rock tendencies.
What we get on I Killed Sara V. is five sweeping tracks that doll up the very rooms they create. We’re placed inside an open space that gets covered in sheer curtains and IKEA-esque lighting in the title track, a revealing number that has Lowell baring herself and her work to us. Opener “Cloud 69” smashes you about with a stomping grin similar to Broken Bells’ fuzzed-up indie rock or Marnie Stern’s hiccup singing, dropping permanent markers in your hands with a nudge, encouraging frenzied doodling on a temporarily whitewashed room.
“I’ll let you know that I can be unfaithful, but I like to tell you when I’m going to stray,” she sings on “88”. If anything, Lowell is straightening out her role as the devious young adult she is, but at least she’s honest. As soon as this wraps up, we’re tossed into the basement dance jam “The Bells” that could easily be a plea to work with AlunaGeorge if they loosen their grip on the whole R&B thing.
Lowell’s got a range in genres and she’s not afraid to seat them next to one another, resulting in intemperate inspiration for interior decorators and creativity deficits worldwide.
