It’d be easy to pretend that things could have been oh-so-very different for Kurt Heasley. Yes, ‘Nanny In Manhattan’ was as huge as it was brilliant, and things were rolling along rather nicely with the release of, for some, Lilys’ masterpiece ‘The 3 Way’. But rather than blame a loss of momentum on an unsympathetic record label, we shouldn’t really overlook the fact that Lilys records aren’t that commercial - ‘Nanny…' was one of those freakish moments in pop when the tables are turned in favour of the leftfield, and it was yet another in a series of hits spawned by a series of seminal Levis ads. And we shouldn’t forget that over the course of six (now seven) albums, Heasley has worked with over 72 musicians. And they say Anton Newcombe is difficult…
Yet somewhere in that balance of melodic nous and maverick single-mindedness, ‘Everything Wrong Is Imaginary’ hangs. Much has been made in the Lilys story of their heavy reliance on British Invasion and psychedelic sources for their sound, but that only creeps up here in the form of the cheeky Kinks-y strum ‘Scott Free’ and the bad acid Barratt folk of ‘Where The Night Goes’. In fact, it’s the other charge laid frequently at Lilys’ door – that they’ve been listening to far too much My Bloody Valentine – that won’t go away. The ghost of Shields and co haunts this album: while Michael Musmanno’s production adds a dream pop haze on most songs, occasionally – as on the unintelligible ‘Knocked On The Fortune Teller’s Door’ – the excessive noise becomes less a haze than a fog.
What drags this album back from the brink is partly Heasley’s embracing of new ideas and partly his sticking to what he knows best. ‘Everything… ’ sees Lilys treading some new ground with excursions into George Clinton-style funk (‘Diana’s Diana’) and the free-form avant-pop of Talk Talk (‘O.I.C.U.R.’). Even the title track is the kind of cute instrumental you’d expect more from Super Furry Animals or Stereolab. Still, the tracks that stand out as strongest – ‘Black Carpet Magic’ and ‘The Night Sun Over San Juan’ – are Lilys at their most retro, most hypnotic, and most beguiling. At such times the same old question rears its head: why the **** isn’t Heasley massive (well, he is over 6’ 7”, but you get me)?
But again, the answer is simply a case of perspective – through wilfulness or circumstance (Heasley brings up his three children single-handedly and had to entrust the entire production of this record to Musmanno while he was away from the studio), Heasley isn’t playing going to play the game. And that’s what makes ‘Everything… ’ everything that it is – an album teetering on that brink between leaden failure and ethereal genius. One day he’ll fall off: let’s hope he lands on the right side.
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