Sing-Sing

Sing-Sing’s debut album, The Joy of Sing-Sing, hit stores in the fall of 2002 amidst numerous references to Emma Anderson’s former, much-beloved band Lush. The music didn’t help, either, since it seemed split between multi-instrumentalist Anderson’s shoegaze history and primary vocalist Lisa O’Neill’s own folk-pop background. And I is much better. It’s sonically diverse, and the arrangements range from atmospheric rock to cheery psychedelics. O’Neill’s lyrics can be intense and cutting; on “Going Out Tonight,” the protagonist is seemingly date-raped, crying, “Can’t remember the dance floor and hours that you can’t account for/And it’s the evening; you have no life to believe in.” Even when the music is consistently bright and melodic, it contains an undercurrent of whimsy and melancholia that is so atypical of modern British rock. “And with dissenters all around,” O’Neill sings on “The Time Has Come,” “it’s time to break and make a sound.”