Lilys - Returns Every Morning

(Che, 1996)

Yeepers, where’d THIS come from?! Lilys ’96 abruptly says goodbye to gauze-pop and hello to mod-pop, stripping away the layers of dreamy guitars and sighing vocals and going for a sharper, more concise, pill-gulpin’ (yet still semi-psych) sound – the sound of FUN! “Returns Every Morning,” taken from the happy-go-peppy Better Can’t Make Your Life Better album, is a fine representation of the chiming, hazy-summer stomp-pop that Heasley would focus on for the second half of the ’90s, a carefree, kickass – if well-trod – regresso-path that has been shared but never bested by sonic cousins like the Asteroid Number Four, Minders, and, at times, Saturday Looks Good to Me. Zanier still is the Apples in Stereo cover “Touch the Water” – Heasley and Robert Schneider crossed musical piss-streams a few times mid-decade – which turns the Apples’ comparatively flat lo-fi rocker into a full-on bubblegum-garage basher. “Touch the Water” was left off of the initial version of the Better… LP but later included on the 1998 UK re-release, which was remixed and generally re-jiggered after the success of “A Nanny in Manhattan.”