Alright Still - Lily Allen > Reviews > Music for the new age Chav.

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Average
Lyrics	Standard
Quality and consistency of tracks	Mixed
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Not applicable
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Catchy songs
Disadvantages:	Gets repetitive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Lily Allen was one of the acts to make it big last year amidst a great deal of hype and an infectious catchy summer single called Smile. Allright Still was the album release that followed on from this and was one of the presents I bought my daughter for Xmas this year.

I have to be honest I did not expect to like this album but actually it was not as bad as I expected it to be however it does have the slight feel of bubblegum pop and I'm fairly confident that after a couple of weeks in the car stereo it will soon find itself in the cabinet at home as although the songs are catchy on the whole they lack substance or any real quality to make them a regular feature of my listening repertoire.

Much of the hype surrounding Ms Allen is down to her reasonably famous father comic Keith Allen who although hardly a household name he is popular with the red tops after his forays into the football song genre with Vindaloo which had awful lyrics but a great piss take of the Verve for a video. To say that her success was solely down to this connection would be unfair, certainly it might have opened some doors despite her claims to the contrary alongside the references to a wild past and the hype always helps but before I was aware of this and first saw her perform Smile live on TV there was a certain quality in the voice that was attractive and her on stage persona is one of teenage vamp when singing the song even if later songs on the album go down the "chavtastic laddete" route of song writing.

What I do like about the album is that there is a decent range to the songs and whilst some of the lyrics are predictable and a bit shallow this perhaps can be accounted for by the fact that as a writer she is merely reflecting her own limited life experiences. There is a heavy reggae influence to some of the songs and also some very catchy Latin beats to the songs which support Smile as the main track on the album.

It is not a new trick to combine catchy beats with rather dark lyrics, The Style Council and particularly the Housemartins / Beautiful South were excellent proponents and with Smile Allen replicates this style, a jaunty upbeat reggae tune with the lyrics focusing on the pleasure she gets from the tears of a former partner who two timed her but now wants her back. The song has a catchy chorus which to a certain extent became associated with the summer and all of the verses are spoken in a rap style along with the constant theme in her songs of dropping consonants when it suits the spacing of the song. Another track on the album which adopts a similar style of an upbeat tune with dark lyrics is my personal favourite LDN which describes the seedy side of London life set to a Ska beat which is precluded by a strong Latin introduction that is well put together. The whole song is really tight apart from one awful line that is a bit out of place and forced however this does not detract from what is a catchy and clever number and catches the feel of a summer stroll through the streets of Soho wonderfully.

The London feature is strong throughout the whole album, in the spoken pats of the album Allen has a strong cockney twang to her words which comes across as a bit forced, whether it is her natural accent I do not know but it does reflect the fact that there is quite a chav feel to her work that will appeal to a certain market. The other theme that peppers a number of her songs is the tough girl theme and this is reflected in Friday Night and Shame for You which are back to back tracks focusing on the club scene and an errant boyfriend respectively and both are used to show that Lily is a tough girl not to be messed with. Friday Night is a good track and again there is a Ska feel to the song but with a heavy pop influence. In fact one of the problems here is that the songs are starting to merge into one another as both of these tracks are in the middle of the album and they are very similar to some of the previous offerings. This is one of the limitations of the album in that there is a lack of range to the songs and they start to feel a little manufactured.

This feeling of manufactured pop is not helped by the fact that on a couple of songs I started to feel that Girls loud could have produced it and the most obvious of these is Everything's Just Wonderful which yet again uses dark lyrics alongside a jaunty beat with a multiple voice style of lyrics that smacks of girl band to me. By now you may have started to see that repetition has well and truly set in and to be fair 75% of the album is very much of the same style and format. A track by track review of this album would have seen a similar amount of repetition from this reviewer as well as my Thesaurus is packed away at the moment.

Littlest Things does attempt to bring a change of pace to the album as it is a slow downed song with a strong piano influence and is more of a ballad and is not a bad song and mixes both talking and singing in a similar style as The Streets but without the same style or biting social comment. This is a nice song but not very memorable.

The only other song of note on the album is the last track of the album called Alfie about her pot smoking brother. Safe to say this is one of those catchy awful songs that is a cross between the sort of catchy drum laden songs her Dad produces and a children nursery rhyme and is sung in an upbeat girly voice by Allen and to be honest is pretty close to being classed as a comedy track, it is quite different to her previous tracks and had me looking for a Chas and Dave credit on the CD cover.

This is not a bad album, in fact it is average and just about srapes a positive recommndation, for me there is too much repetition in the musical styles to make it stand out, the positives are some biting lyrics especially some of the put downs, certainly it is not wise to do the dirty on Ms Allen, and there are some catchy tunes to be heard. For me the constant chav theme was a little tiring and perhaps some of the limitations of this album are reflected in the limited life experiences of the writer. Whether Lily Allen will enjoy similar success in 2007 remains to be seen, her appeal is largely with the young female audience which is very fickle and unless her music is able to mature to appeal to a wider audience similar to Amy Winehouse then her success may be a bit more limited.

I got my copy from 4CheapCDs.com for £5.99 just before Xmas, on that same site now it is £6.95 which includes post and packaging however to be honest I would probably just download the individual tracks I like rather than buy if it had not been a present for my daughter. The album does contain strong language and references to both drug taking and sexual activity.