★½
Given how weak her new album is, Lissie’s choice of title seems like an open invitation for snarkiness.
So, here it is: with its half-baked pop stylings and vague, underdeveloped touches of light rock, Lissie’s third album, My Wild West, is less wild and more mundane. It’s not a trip through the frontier, it’s a stumble through a series of first world problems, and it grows increasingly dull with every single track.
It’s wiggy, overly considered nonsense from the start, with the hideously pretentious ‘My Wild West Overture’ kicking the whole white-bread mess into gear. One gets the sense Lissie designed the album from the outside, constructing a track like ‘Sun Keeps Risin’’ with the aim to manipulate and move listeners without ever really asking herself why. Indeed, this is the crux of the issue: Lissie never manages to convince us to care. It’s a shame, particularly given that her voice is pleasant, and she knows her way around both a piano and a radio-friendly chorus. But the emotional rasp of tracks like ‘Wild West’ and ‘Hero’ feels affected and unreal, like Adele reprogrammed and blooped out by a golden-voiced robot.
This isn’t the harsh wilderness: it’s the Hollywood soundstage for a Z-grade Western, the dirt just painted plastic and the high blue sky a backdrop.
Lissie’sMy Wild Westis out through Cooking Vinyl now.
