Phebe Starr
Iced Tea Liberace
Palace
I have no idea where the name of this disc came from, but it’s one of my favorites this season. Ms. Starr is an up and coming pop chanteuse from Down Under, and she has the look, the voice and some interesting tunes that might push her up to the top of the charts. The title track on this four cut collection takes a dreamy lyric and drapes it over a looped hip hop beat. The start-stop rhythm paints a counterpoint to a lost love song and the bitterness of the romance gone bad. What the detail mean is beyond me, but there’s an earworm here that I keep resetting as I write these words.
“Break the Law” follows a more traditional romance beat, but there still some urban lurking in this tune. Samples are spare and thin as audio features slide off int to ad hoc minimalism, and there’s even a mild drop, or more properly and step down that punctuates the romance. Then we hear “TOUCH XXX” and when a song is titles all in caps, we expected something angry and rebellious. That’s not the vibe here yet an internal compass points to a bad ending to the romance. For a wrap up, Ms. Starr gives us “Band News.” When that’s a title of this sort in a collection of love lost tunes, you should expect it to be VERY bad. Ms. Starr is not going to have this guy’s babies, and there might even be worse things ahead. Ms. Starr has a solid handle on sad love songs, and I hope her personal life is better. This is one of the most unique EP’s I’ve seen this year; let’s hope we hear more music form this promising rookie singer.
