Nellie McKay

Get Away From Me

Columbia

“Get Away From” is the most assured, confident album from a veteran whose varied inspirations and eclectic musical interests have coalesced into a fascinating, entertaining and often wondrous whole. After a long and fruitful career, here’s an album in which the artist’s musical maturity and quirky inventiveness have come together to realize every ambition that has been strived for. It’s quite possibly the most striking effort put out by said artist to date.

At least, that’s what it sounds like.

“Get Away From Me” is actually the ambitious, eccentric and jaw-dropping debut of Nellie McKay, a 19-year-old musical whiz whose startling scope and bravura belie the girl’s adolescence. This teenager whose sheer verve, charm, wit and adventurousness should shame every plastic teen-pop wannabe who’s wandered onto MTV in the past five years has put out an album.

Inevitable comparisons will try to match McKay with Norah Jones, the smoky voiced chanteuse whose lounge-bar jazz has unexpectedly found suit with Top 40 listeners. It’s a comparison that’s both apt and devastatingly myopic in its flat, dubious, shorthand assertions. On the surface, McKay can come off like a Jones redux: all sultry, midnight-at-the-jazz-bar crooning and tinkling, easy-does-it piano. But there’s none of the dull, claustrophobic tastefulness of Jones for McKay. Instead, this freewheeling gal has fun spinning off on broad, bracing musical tangents that plumbs the depth of numerous disparate genres: pop, rock, hip-hop, cabaret, showtunes, you name it. There isn’t a musical tchotchkie that McKay doesn’t want to lay her hands on.

And wonder of all wonders, it all works. McKay lays waste to Jones’ boringly classy music with a vibrant, satirical glee, but that doesn’t mean she sinks to juvenile, parodic pandering; just because you’re “maturing” pop doesn’t mean you have to stifle your sense of humor. “Get Away From Me” (the title is a delightfully sardonic dig at Jones’ debut) has a spirit of playful creativity coursing through its veins, even when it’s at its most “traditional.”

McKay has a knack for witty, innovative satire and off-the-cuff humor that one wishes more of the overly earnest modern pop pack would be able to coax out of itself. But since most popsters and rock stars seem more at ease with simplistic, heavy-handed “sincerity,” McKay’s delightfully droll humor stands out even more.

But just because McKay is wacky does not mean that she’s surrendered to irony or post-modernism. No matter what style the girl finds herself reveling in, she displays a genuine respect and affection for it. She stumbles through genres with child-like abandon, picking up bits and pieces that she admires along the way, but she mish-mashes her influences together in a way that sounds natural rather than schizophrenic.

McKay hops from bouncy showtune-pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Broadway stage to lush cool-jazz even on to a fairly convincing rap on the clever, wordy “Sari.” Not for nothing have other sources compared her to Eminem, whose way with a barb has lead him to become the most popular and influential of current hip-hop artists. McKay may just be the point where Marshall Mathers, Norah Jones and Randy Newman meet.

McKay uses her tongue-firmly-in-cheek humor to address a raft of social issues over the course of her double-disc set (don’t worry folks, there’s only eighteen tracks spread over both discs, with a cumulative running time of about an hour.) A typical refrain goes something like this: “Mister Bushie says/ I’m your president/I have lots to say/hey hey hey/and click goes the remote/ there you have my vote.”

“Sari,” the albums best track, addresses the issue of self-image and how it’s perceived, both as a woman and as someone following for a personal muse. Phen-phen, and the Oxygen Network are among McKay’s targets in a tongue-twister of a song that would probably leave Em gasping for breathing.

From attacking the hypocrisy of image, McKay launches into a song like the jubilant “Ding Dong,” which wouldn’t sound out of place in a Debbie Boone album. And on and on it goes, with McKay appropriating a funky blaxploitation groove on “Baby Watch Your Back,” skewering preening male insincerity on “It’s A Pose,” or tossing off a couplet like “yeah, I’ll have my coffee black/ oh look, we’re bombing Iraq” on “Toto Dies.”

A thriving techno beat underscores “Waiter,” while a staccato march kicks off “Change the World” before the song lapses into a poppy Caribbean beat and then into a piano driven chorus and back into a march. All the while McKay sings about self-discovery.

Players, marriage, the Iraq war, even cloning all come out of McKay’s tumultuous inner world, rendering her lyrical and thematic ambitions as large and all-encompassing as her musical ones. Remarkably, McKay has the talent to keep “Get Away From Me” from falling apart in the ash-heap of failed pretensions. That’s because McKay uses her quirky, bold, wide-ranging, gorgeous voice as glue to hold it all together.

In an age in which plastic, airbrushed pop stars rule the radio, when more talk is spent on Janet Jackson’s breast or Britney Spears’ image than on the music they make, it’s more than refreshing to find a young singer with has much skill and a willing to experiment such as McKay. By visiting a long-forgotten past and bringing it into the 21 century, Nellie McKay has returned pop music to its long-lost glory. That’s more than exciting. That’s a miracle.