You could be excused for thinking that Lily Allen is this decade's version of Liz Phair. Like Phair, her debut album came out amid excitement for its new sound and controversy over the frank lyrics. But that's about all the two have in common. Phair's Exile in Guyville was so unproduced that it defined indie rock of the time, almost as if she and her producer had decided to avoid everything that made mainstream rock sound like that: slighly off-tune guitars and vocals, hollow sounding rooms where the echo was provided by the acoustics rather than added by a reverb effect, and concentrating on instruments that had to be played not programmed, even if that meant there were a lot more warts showing. Allen's debut is the exact opposite, with programmed beats, layers (sometimes upon layers) of overdubs and added instrumentation, her voice cleaned up with a judicious use of Pro Tools, and everything as crisp and clean as if the world was a perfect place. What it goes to show you is that sometimes the sound doesn't matter when you've got someone with attitude and a tart mouth.

Strangely enough, it wasn't the lyrics that first attracted me to this album, but the retro-sound of some of the songs that invoke the feel-good music of the 40s (think Louis Prima and Ann-Margret, a big band sound that was fast and fun). It was the best reproduction of that feeling I had heard since I grooved to The Cardigan's "Lovefool" single. Some of the songs come by their retro sound directly through parts sampled from folks like Professor Longhair, a method of stitching together that began with hip-hop but has now become common in pop.

The lyrics are a perfect foil for this happy-go-lucky music. At first listen, the lyrics seem to be as happy as the music, but as Allen stated in an interview on NPR's "All Things Considered," if she starts with a positive line in the verse, the chorus will then turn that entire idea around to show a dark underbelly. She's as frank as Phair in her words, not afraid to drop the f-bomb or indicate that she knows that where exactly one gets the bird and just how the bees can sting. A couple of songs are as nasty as Alanis Morissette's "You Oughta Know" in their desire for revenge at the lover who jilted her, and then she turns around and writes a pure love song in "Littlest Things."

The joy of this album for me is Allen's humorous turn on a number of songs, including the single "Alfie" and "Knock 'Em Out." The former is an open advice column to her brother, whom she depicts as a stoner who is constantly in his room "high on THC." She urges him to get up and have a life. It's brutal and cruel, and extremely funny, and Allen admitted in the NPR interview that her real baby brother wasn't too happy with the song, but he was older now. The latter song (which starts with the aforementioned sample piano part from Prof. Longhair) depicts a botched pickup attempt on a woman at a bar and her desperate measures to tell the guy to fuck off, while remaining polite. Equally cruel is the "extra" song on the US version of the CD, "Nan You're a Window Shopper," wherein Allen chastises her grandmother for her senior citizen habits of always wearing her fleece and clipping coupons she doesn't need. It's as easily as brutal as the song about her brother, but at times it induces more cringes than laughs, perhaps because the target isn't quite as deserving of her barbs, although they strike home just as solidly.

Allen does have one thing that Liz Phair didn't have, and that's the most adorable British accent that makes even the most stretched metaphor seem a little more mannered, at least to this anglophile. Everything's better if your a's are all open, as well as your ears.