Erin McKeown – Hundreds of Lions

Erin McKeown used to be the most irritatingly perky person in indie pop music. Classically trained and holding a degree in ethnomusicology, the bright-haired and wide-eyed singer/songwriter combined pan-cultural and multi-generational musical elements with an anthropologist’s geeky love of history, even as she wrote sunshiny melodies and sang her lyrics as though there were a cheerful exclamation point at the end of each line. Thing was, as attention-seeking as that all sounds on paper, it was clear that McKeown’s on-record persona was no act; her giddy naiveté was totally sincere, which made her impossible to dislike even if the music sometimes wore out its welcome.

She’s grown up a bit, thank God, and cultivated a sound that plays to her strengths and dials down the hopped-up peppiness without placing any restrictions on her free spirit: With each album she’s made (save, perhaps, for her standards album, Sing You Sinners), she’s further developed her sense of texture and pacing, perfected her innate sense of drama and fleshes out her music with a more diverse palette of sounds, combined in increasingly seamless and sophisticated ways. 2005’s We Will Become Like Birds remains her finest work, a remarkably sophisticated album of breezy pop-folk tunes wrapped up in hazy electronics and spiked with guitar rock.

Hundreds of Lions is the name of her new one, and her first collection of original material in more than four years. And it finds her tinkering with Birds’ sound by absorbing some of the things she picked up from Sing You Sinners: These songs are pitched somewhere between pop ditties and small-scale showtunes, folksy pop still serving as the foundation but strings, woodwinds, and vaudeville piano decorating the borders. Electronic effects plays a bigger role, too, providing a chilly, faux-lounge feel to some of these tunes. The cumulative effect is an odd one, to say the least: McKeown is still incapable of recording a song that isn’t, on some level, playful, but this one is the darkest, most brooding collection she’s ever made, moody and nocturnal where Birds was summery and lightweight.

And if it’s not as easy to warm up to as Birds was, it’s every bit as easy to respect: This is McKeown’s most mature work, a careful balance of all her strengths and quirks. First song “To a Hammer,” for instance, is a nimble ballet performed only with voice and string accompaniment, its lyrics a series of clever metaphors, but it’s not super-perky; its lilt is melancholy rather than chirpy, its lyrics unraveling a love gone cold. “Santa Cruz,” meanwhile, keeps the strings but adds quirky percussion and cascading, classical pianos before an electric guitar enters and turns the song into a mid-tempo, guitar-rock anthem with sounds both classical and vaguely ethnic dancing along the edges.

These songs are some of the best, most well-rounded tracks on the record because they find McKeown balancing her gifts so well—gifts at composition, at storytelling, and at performing. Other tracks are a little more off-kilter, less flawless but no less magical: “(Put the Fun Back in the) Funeral” combines chilly electronics and black humor into a sort of macabre chillout tune. “The Rascal,” meanwhile, is a techno-fied Tin Pan Alley tune, its good-natured wordplay and hand-clap beat making it sound like one of the standards from Sing You Sinners, re-imagined for the electronic age.

What makes the album so winsome, ultimately, is that it hones McKeown’s playful tendencies with a sense of craft, and that’s seen nowhere better than on “The Lions,” a slinky song with a circus vibe that uses carnival imagery as fodder for hilarious wordplay; its narrative is rich in innuendo which could be a veiled gay rights song, an admonishment toward kinky sex, or simply a celebration of risking your dignity for love and romance.

This is a slinky, relatively mellow little album, even its cheeriest and most upbeat moments sounding fairly chilled; ironically enough, the biggest complaint here is that a few of these songs could have used an extra jolt of energy, something McKeown used to have in surplus. But lest she think she can’t win for losing, I emphasize that she comes out a champ on this one, an album that stands proudly beside any that she’s made and demonstrates most clearly why she’s a singer/songwriter of vast skill and seemingly endless imagination. She’s quietly building a legacy of high-caliber pop music that’s as universal as it is idiosyncratic, and Hundreds of Lions is an essential addition to that canon.

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