Fingerprints Music

Reviews:

"Nellie McKay is such an old fashioned kind of gal, her hour-long debut is broken up into two CDs, representative of the two sides of what we used to call ""albums."" The self-conscious uniqueness doesn't end there. McKay generally writes the kind of music that was termed ""pop"" in the '40s and '50s-piano-led, cocktail-jazzy, lightly melancholy when not brassily winking and nudging, with swooping vocal lines-and as a singer she has the chops to match. The closest she gets to turn-on-the-radio-no-not-NPR modern is the chamber-pop of ""Baby Watch Your Back"" and the ""rapping"" on ""Sari."" And she writes really screwy lyrics-think Randy Newman, or Steely Dan if they'd shunned electric guitars. Except-the big except-McKay isn't a grouchy thirty-to-sixtysomething. She's all of 19, an odd age for someone to name-check Ethel Merman. Even Harry Connick, Jr. and Norah Jones didn't go public with their retro-fitted style till well into their 20s.

Even when McKay's showy or cute (the ""That's what it's all a-bow-wow-wowt"" that caps ""The Dog Song""), her tunes stick, and so do her arrangements, which have an appealing woody finish. Like many young, ambitious artists, McKay's a bit catty-her album title swats at Jones's Come Away With Me-and like many a bright, college-age bohemian she's too condescending for her own good. ""I only listen to Top 40,"" she coos satirically on ""Won't U Please B Nice,"" and on ""I Wanna Get Married,"" we get, ""I wanna pack cute little lunches/ For my Brady Bunches/ And read Danielle Steele."" In short, she makes fun of middle-aged housewives in exactly the way you'd expect from someone with more intelligence than experience. Good thing that isn't true of the way she writes music.

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