Let it be known that I rejoiced when Lily Allen plonked her surprise return to music “Hard Out Here” out on the interweb at the tail end of last year, being that I’ve always been partial to her rebellious pop upstart antics. This was only to be short-lived though, after it was immediately trumped by the promotional release for John Lewis’s Christmas campaign with the sickenly sweet and sugary overloaded cover of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know”, which I will have recorded that I did nothing but barf at. I know Lily is a mommy now but this was NOT the Lily Allen that engages me and neither is her latest pop nursery rhyme “Air Balloon” to be honest.
Not without it’s auto-tuned faults Lily has a placement with the track “L8 CMMR” on the official HBO Soundtrack album “Girls Volume 2: All Adventurous Women Do” for the same hit US TV series “Girls”, which is the absolutely the Lily Allen I DO want to hear, only BOO-HOO and major humpppfff it doesn’t appear to be available in the UK as of yet!
For the most part I’m just happy that the ballsy Lily Allen is still alive and kicking amongst those previous twee pop offerings I’ve noted, and I will even side-eye the use of autotune on “L8 CMMR” over the gloriously retro zappy gameboy content for the lyric video.
What perplexes me is Lily’s current flip turns in music presentation, sure every artist has to evolve their sound if they are they stand any chance of going the distance, but with Lily’s current leap-frogging from her trademark gutsy honesty to cutesy nursery rhyme candy pop and toy style appealing video game promotions, in nothing but a blink of an eye, I think we’re going to see some real wee, wee, wee babies out there in the kindergarten playgrounds, singing about baggy vagina’s in one breath and twinkle, twinkle little star in another. Attempting to seemingly appeal to two broadly different audiences is a knife-edge act. From one mom to another, just saying.