Video premiere: Alex Lilly, ‘I Can’t Tell You’

Kevin Bronson on September 19th, 2016

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Alex Lilly, live in 2015 (Photo by Michelle Shiers)

Avant-pop siren Alex Lilly has always colored outside the lines, whether in her earliest incarnation Colorforms, or as Obi Best, or in Touché (her collaboration with Bram Inscore), or in the madcap Zero DeZire (with Barbara Gruska). And she does know where the lines are — her other exploits have included her role as the “fourth sister” in the harmonic quartet the Living Sisters, and touring gigs with the Bird and the Bee, Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Juliette Commagere, among others.

This week she releases music under her own name for the first time, the “Paranoid Times” EP. Spanning five songs, it’s like a musical game of Twister, bright and colorful and full of derring-do: melodies that flit all over the scale, crazy beats, wonky synths, saxophones and some nifty lyrical reality checks. Last summer Lilly unveiled one version of the EP’s title track that features a rap verse from Tré Hardson of the Pharcyde — the EP’s co-producer Keefus Green hooked up that cameo — but on the EP, the song is just Lilly, straight up, bemoaning “residual fear from the cave days,” she says. That sentiment carries over into “Photogenic Life” and society’s unhealthy obsession with image. Lilly’s vocals are up there on their tippy toes on “Tippy Toes,” and lush on the heartsick “I Look for You” (“I still go out / with your memory.”) The latter is one of three songs on the EP made with producer/composer Michael Andrews (“Donnie Darko,” Brendan Benson, Gary Jules, Metric, Inara George).

Which brings us to “I Can’t Tell You” and its closet-emptying video. The song confesses to fear of being honest with someone who has a similar fear of honesty. “What’s inside you? / Do you even know?” she wonders. There’s also this verse: “I love my friends / They never hide their secrets / Always writing beautiful melodies / For people who aren’t worth it.” (Toldja she knows where the lines are.) The remarkable stop-motion video for the song, composed of about 1,300 images, is the work of Lilly and Daiana Feuer (of Bloody Death Skull), and it stars … shoes. You will have to imagine the wearers, but they are going places and doing things typical of people who in shoes, even having a Busby Berkeley moment. Would it be simply too punny to say that it’s quite a feat?

||| Watch: The video for “I Can’t Tell You”