Pretty Little Head

Sure, McKay is a sonic chameleon, but perhaps more important, she is one deft (and witty) songwriter/musician. [14 Jan 2006]

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.

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.

What... is immediately evident is the extent to which McKay has grown as a musician. [Feb 2006, p.130]

Though 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]

That 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]

Candy-coated and a teensy bit tart, Pretty Little Head grows in delight with every bite.

She's bewildering.

The more I listened, the more beguiling it became. [Dec 2006, p.93]

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.

Shed of a few tracks, Head would be a more top-to-bottom pleasing album, but it wouldn't be McKay's album.

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.

Pretty 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.

Who knew that your grandparents' record collection could produce something so sassy?

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."