Lilys
Services (For the Soon to Be Departed) (Primary)
by Nik Rainey
A couple of months ago, I attempted to interview Kurt (Wally) Heasley, the singer/guitarist (and sole mainstay) of the presently Boston-based Mensa-pop combo the Lilys. That interview will probably never see the light of day – Heasley was hopped up on his pregnant wife’s pre-natal vitamins and ripped into an hour-long stream-of-consciousness rant, dissing Ebonics (“What’s that about, yo?”), cursing Rolling Stone, reminiscing about the time he locked himself out of the Tower Records store in D.C. and having co-employee Dave Grohl show up and laugh at him, quoting a long passage from The Simpsons in several voices, finally asking “You guys want a flexi? Here’s one,” and regaling me with a crazed, way-offkey rendition of Paul McCartney’s “Coming Up” that would have made Linda proud. I never got a question in. (Come to think of it, maybe it should be printed…)
That kind of high-octane intellect and wit fairly strains the seams of the upbeat, ’60s-flecked music Heasley’s taken to of late. Last year’s Better Can’t Make Your Life Better rightly upped the salivary glands of the underground bliss corps to Niagran levels with its recognizable ’60s pop hooks subtly bent and reshaped into fresh configurations, and his latest, Services (For The Soon To Be Departed) continues in that heady tradition. Granted, it’s a little more ambitious – Heasley (with forked tongue piercing cheek) calls it “a blues opera for a yet-unborn child named Tayt in six movements” (so it’s a Tayt cycle as opposed to, say, a Matthew suite), but it’s as catchy as its predecessor. Farfisa trills, twangy guitars and punchy snares abound, albeit in the service of titles such as “Hark, An Open Channel” and “The Gravity Free Atmosphere of MSA” and choruses like “Philanthropy is dead/ Why don’t you just take the dime instead?” More arcane ’67-isms have started to appear as well: “The First Half Second” includes intentional vocal distortion a la Love’s “You Set the Scene,” and the forty-seven second “Pookah” bears a fricative rhythm recalling the electric jug sound of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. The sum total most closely resembles the furrowed-brow popism of the Loud Family’s Scott Miller, although while Miller’s records often require three or four listens to figure out before their genius comes clear, Heasley makes songs that bounce off your pleasure center immediately and reveal their oblique angles only gradually. The only fault with this disc is that, at 15:36, it’s too friggin’ short. Would that he wrote songs as fast as he talked.
