Paula Kelley
Nothing/Everything (Stop, Pop, and Roll)
by Marc Hirsh
Paula Kelley
Nothing/Everything (Stop, Pop, and Roll)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
I'm really not sure what it says about an album whose most salient feature is the backing vocals, but that's precisely what sells me on Nothing/Everything . They don't even fall squarely into the category of straight-up background harmony; we're talking about sheer, stand-alone vocals of the "ooh la la la" school, as though Rubber Soul happened yesterday. And, truth to be told, they're glorious, winding their way through Paula Kelley's songs like another instrument, the way some folks add a keyboard or saxophone to the lineup.
It's the singing in the foreground that's going to polarize listeners. Kelley has been saddled with an impossibly girlish voice that occasionally devours her lyrics; it wasn't until I confronted her after a show that I finally learned that Barry Gibb was "wrong," not "robbed." Cutesypoo this ain't, though; Kelley neither exploits her teeny-tiny voice nor ignores it to the point of writing checks her pipes can't cover. She simply lays it out there unaffected, and if you don't like it, at least it's an honest reaction to an honest performance.
The real trick with Nothing/Everything is to find a reason to stick with it. Despite the sunny pop melodies couched in a luscious mid-'70s Rundgrenian bed of giddy acoustics, lyrical electrics and occasional light orchestration (the breezy "You Gonna Make It?" nicely manages to combine strings and handclaps successfully), it's not really until the third or fourth listen that Nothing/Everything starts to gel. The songs may take their sweet time digging in but stay deep once embedded. The album has few real peaks; the only songs that continued to surprise me after hearing them once are the peripatetic, slowly swelling "Girl of the Day" and the mellotron-driven "Ordinary Mind," which shifts from vaguely downcast verses to a sprightly bridge that threatens to turn the song's earlier Four Seasons paraphrase into a direct quote before spiralling, unnoticed, back to the moodiness of the chorus. Even so, Nothing/Everything is never less than solidly entertaining throughout, as the rest of the album merely nails a comfortably enjoyable tone right from the start and barely budges for the duration.