Overstuffed to the Brim of Bursting: Fresh Ears on "Life Is Sweet"

A blank check can be hard to spend wisely. When you've got one of the greatest, rangiest, most expressive rock 'n' roll voices ever, as Maria McKee does, what do you do with it? You can start by singing the daylights out of two albums with a band your producers don't do (lone) justice to, then make two great solo Americana records; you can lend your voice to a few soundtrack hits along the way.

Then one day you might hand your record label a self-produced magnum opus that opens with jagged stabs of electric guitar, followed by these lyrics:

Been over this a hundred times we've talked it to its black end
It begins again and again there's nothing we can say
My brain has derailed, my hands are benailed
You fall across my body like a death shroud

McKee's 1996 album Life Is Sweet, which tanked her budding career as surely as Elvis Costello's racist outburst did his, only gets weirder and woollier from that point. And while I'm prepared after this Fresh Ears™ relisten to agree with its partisans that it's a kind of masterpiece, it is a studiedly bumpy fantasia, not an immediately accessible joyride—the kind of masterpiece that must be mastered. As I've noticed with Fiona Apple, this and most of McKee's records since (including her newest) demand a level of non-casual attention akin to that required by original cast albums of musicals. In fact the record I kept thinking of this time 'round was Hedwig and the Angry Inch: the clear debt to Bowie and Mick Ronson, coupled with a certain emotional exhibitionism and theatrical ambition, make it a spiritual cousin to that towering rock musical landmark. McKee has also acknowledged some debt mid-'90s British guitar rock (Suede, Blur, Oasis), though its art-rock blare and tectonic chord changes also put me in mind a bit of vintage Radiohead.

There's really only one upbeat banger in the lot, "Everybody," with its exhilarating "maybe tomorrow" fadeout sending the bass down and the vocals up, for a cleaving effect similar to one I noted in this Purcell classic. Other songs, even ones that can be broken into standard verse-chorus forms upon examination, come off like mini-suites, including the jarring "Scarlover," which sounds like roughly five songs stuck together until you've heard it a few times. "Absolutely Barking Stars" has an acoustic/electric chunka-chunk that recalls Bowie's "Cygnet Committee." The title song is an affecting outsider's anthem, with perhaps the album's only straightforward tune and lyrics.

But the two that have most grown on me happen to be the most Radiohead-like: "Smarter," whose chromatic chord changes and angular melody acquire a majestic inevitability upon repeated listenings (again, these are mandatory), and "Human," a midtempo cruncher that is somehow both heavy and delicate, earthbound and ethereal; listen for the sweetly dissonant guitar figure at 2:23, then tell me this record isn't a work of genius.

One thing Life Is Sweet doesn't evoke at all, even for a second, is the full-throated country/soul belter she burst onto the scene as. I guess that was no more the real Maria than any Bowie guise was the real David Jones. But if this was Dust Bowl cosplay, it was some of the most convincing I've ever seen. It's as if Janis Joplin and Dolly Parton had a love child. How did this girl never become a huge star?

Compare that to the willfully genre-free banging and bleating below. It is as compelling in its own goth-punk way as the above frisky rock set is. But just 11 years later, this is simply a different artist, albeit with the same set of pipes:

The link between these wildly various dispensations, she suggests in this Dutch documentary (well worth your time despite the occasional untranslated voiceover), is that she has always been the sum of all her disparate influences, “from Edith Piaf to Patti Smith to Tom Waits to Bill Monroe to Howlin’ Wolf to Stephen Sondheim." That's a list I can get behind and then some.

And though it is hard to hear direct links to any of those artists on Life Is Sweet, that gives some idea of the surplus multitudes she contains. It turns out that when you have the kind of voice that allows you to sing anything, you can choose different flavors to sample, one by one—or, as McKee does on Life Is Sweet, brew them into a bouillabaisse as delicious as it is difficult to digest at a sitting. With a work of art as capacious and forbidding as this, I've learned that it's okay to take a break from it for days, or in my case years. Life can be as long as it sweet.