Sire

Should an uncanny mastery of '60s vibeology be enough to justify a band's existence? That's the question I found myself asking as I listened to this record. Following the Lilys' previous, a stellar platter called Better Can't Make Your Life Better that boasted plenty of psych-pop hipness but had the heart and songs to back it up, I had high expectations for The 3-Way. There's a lot to like here sonically, but it seems the band have chosen style over substance.

The 3-Way's album art is a painstaking '60s mockup with vintage-looking photos of the group in cheeky moptops and mod drag playing vintage guitars. There's even a shot of a vintage girlfriend. Where's the mystery? When the bands the Lilys are visually emulating first emerged, this sort of thing was indeed mysterious. It was competing against "Beach Blanket Bingo". Now it's just visual shorthand for "Retro-hipster record inside! Buy me, slip on your Beatle boots and become walking kitsch!"

Okay, ranting aside, who cares about the packaging if the music delivers the goods? That's the problem. Only about a third of The 3-Way really seduces. The rest takes the Lilys' pleasant musical vocabulary - shimmying rhythms, go-go guitars, and blissful psychedelic interludes, and spreads them over long, unnecessarily complicated songs that sound great but say exactly nothing. Michael Deming has a charmed, pretty voice, but outside of his sudden leap into falsetto on the album's best track, "And One (On One)", he never strays from the same wan, self-satisfied tone. Factor in Deming's apparently meaningless lyrics and these songs might as well be instrumentals. There's even a kitschy piece with a campy foreign-language voiceover. Why so cute?

Maybe the problem is Deming is actually too talented, or just too eager to cram all of his song ideas into one album. When he actually sticks with one focused idea long enough to make it sink in, as on the garage stomp "Dimes Make Dollars" or the swirling, organ-driven "The Spirits Merchant" (or any of Better Can't Make Your Life Better), there are flashes of genius. Songs like "Socs Hip" or "Accepting Applications At University", on the other hand, contain such an array of non-repeating hooks and changes that their impact is nonexistent. It's like riding in the car with someone and there are 10 great songs on the radio, but the person keeps flipping the stations every few seconds anyway.

Maybe we've just wrung every drop of inspiration we can from the venerable '60s. The time has come to pull our heads from our space-age bachelor pad asses and do something different. There are other decades to rip off. Hell, even prog rock, the easiest slag target of the last 30 years, is, in some circles, hip now. Kind of makes you queasy, doesn't it?

At any rate, it hurts to see an obviously talented group like the Lilys worry so much about recreating Nuggets guitar tones and modeling the Kinks' old wardrobe and forget to bust ass. Referencing the past is fine in subtle doses, and the '60s is a helluva decade to plunder, but if you don't have the songs, people are going to catch on sooner or later.