LILYS 'Better Can't Make Your life Better' LP

NEW/SEALED

The Lilys became a different band with each album, thanks to the aesthetic whims of madcap leader Kurt Heasley and a revolving-door personnel policy that rivals the Fall’s. After shaking off their early ’90s shoegaze guise, the Lilys delivered a major-label debut that’s full of Kinks—in the big-K and little-k senses.

Better Can’t Make Your Life Better is classic Brit-rock contorted: while “Shovel Into Spade Kit” revs up on a snarling riff you’d swear was emanating from an old Pye Records 45, Heasley spends the rest of the circuitous song smashing up the vinyl and gluing the pieces back together into curious new combinations. But the complicated approach could yield simple pleasures: Thanks to a plum placement in a Levi’s ad, the delirious, cowbell-clanging “Nanny in Manhattan” became the rare mid-’90s American rock import to jostle for chart space in the UK Top 20.