Pretty Little Head
- Nellie McKay
- Band Name: Nellie McKay
- Record Label: Black Dove
- Release Date: Oct 31, 2006
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Not every moment is essential, but compromise just isn't part of McKay's dazzling, defiant repertoire.
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90Sure, McKay is a sonic chameleon, but perhaps more important, she is one deft (and witty) songwriter/musician. [14 Jan 2006]
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Adding some range to the offbeat persona she presented in 2004's "Get Away From Me," McKay comes on as a Harlem Holly Golightly, a twentysomething social activist with a disarming mastery of pop vernacular -- pop in the broadest sense, embracing cabaret, show tunes, old standards and a bit of '70s rock in the vein of Elton John and Cyndi Lauper.
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It's the same McKay on Pretty Little Head. Still the same pretensions, still the same confusions, still the same ability to overcome her own self-imposed handicaps to put out an absolute killer of an album.
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80Though she seems to be done with rapping, her hip-hop loops and restless genre-mixing still save her from vintage-dress purgatory. [Jan/Feb 2006, p.94]
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Pretty Little Head sounds like a record from a woman coming out of girlhood -- more confident, more wise about love, and more focused about her concerns, if no less passionate.
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80That she succeeds on a record as sophisticated as the self-produced Pretty Little Head is not only a testament to McKay's talent, it's also a tribute to her artistic sense. [Jan 2006, p.90]
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What... is immediately evident is the extent to which McKay has grown as a musician. [Feb 2006, p.130]
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The more I listened, the more beguiling it became. [Dec 2006, p.93]
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80She's bewildering.
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80Candy-coated and a teensy bit tart, Pretty Little Head grows in delight with every bite.
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The stream-of-conscious raps that peppered her debut have been scaled back, replaced by relatively more traditional compositions, but the music is still deliciously unpredictable, and the words are a pack of SweeTart poetry.
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Shed of a few tracks, Head would be a more top-to-bottom pleasing album, but it wouldn't be McKay's album.
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74Pretty Little Head is better than her debut. It's less showy, more confident, tighter, lacking antics-- it's confounding stylistically, just as her debut was, but less an act of throwing ideas at the wall.
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Who knew that your grandparents' record collection could produce something so sassy?
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McKay's voice is the real treat as she trips gaily from airy on "Pink Chandelier" to the vocal equivalent of a furrowed brow on "There You Are in Me."
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It's one thing to be eclectic; it's another thing entirely for an album to lack a cohesive conceit that connects one track to all the others.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 6
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Mixed: 0 out of 6
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Negative: 0 out of 6
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JohnR8
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ReubenF7
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GilesB7great album let down by one or two really annoying tunes