Lissie - Cuckoo

Lissie, like Ellie Goulding, is one of those people who has shown up on indie radars everywhere despite not doing a huge amount to warrant it. Unlike, say, Florence & The Machine, there’s no revivalist feel (maybe of 2000’s crappy country pop scene), and little that makes it hers. The end result for her well produced material (her raw acoustic stuff is usually really good and personal) is that it can sound like just another singer / songwriter lost somewhere in the galaxy of Alanis Morissette. Perfect for cafes in New York perhaps, but it doesn’t really translate to something you can be inspired by.

The song itself recalls elements of the aforementioned Canadian warbler, Shania Twain, as well as The Corrs and perhaps even - dare we say it - Sandi Thom, to make a weird composite of all of them that subsequently distills Lissie’s own personality. The feel of the music can sometimes be unimportant if there are good lyrics – for example Wavves’ ‘How Are You’ – but in this case the lyrics are just as bad. For example, ‘You and me, we are never growing old’ is perhaps one of the oldest clichés known to man, ‘They’re telling our story on the radio’ is a rip off of an old Bragg lyric, and ‘a pickup truck that roared like a lion’ is just plain bad.

It’s a well made song, just a country / folk pop tune done by numbers. There is nothing original about this, and we get a song that could soundtrack a Hollywood movie, but not a real life.