THE GIRL I USED TO BE
by LEXI STREET

Sexy rock for intelligent listeners

By Rick Hines, Feb. 9, 2004

So, you've never heard of Lexi Street, Atlanta's best kept secret? Don't let that stop you from buying this CD and letting her introduce herself.

Lexi's a complex girl whose songs pull you in with an air of smoky, lingering sexuality. The initial reaction might be, "Here's another hot looking girl using sex to pedal her otherwise mediocre wares." (And the CD cover might only reinforce this opinion.) But you'd be only half right. For her, sensuality sells, but she's selling the musical real deal.

Lexi uses that flirtatious mood like a hook in a song, just a detail to pull you into her musical world. In this way, she is very much like Kate Bush, who also had to fight initial resistance to her music due to her good looks. If you listen to Bush's song "The Sensual World," you will know some of Lexi's world. Here, sensuality means "an awareness and appreciation of all the body's senses in a tactile world," not just "sex" in the way most entertainment is marketed these days.

Also like Kate, Lexi shows an amazing ability to use her voice like a jazz instrument, not afraid to stretch a vocal line past comprehension to stress a unique melody or mood. The results are often quite striking. The rest of the band (the nucleus of which recorded this CD) rises to Lexi's challenge and provides original and supple jazz-influenced backing. The band prefers to simmer slowly most times, but beneath the simmer you can feel the coiled muscle of energy that only completely unleashes on stage. Like King Crimson, even the quietest passages are full of drama.

The songs themselves are quite capable of drilling into your brain until you can't stop singing them to yourself. My personal favorite is the up-tempo "Atlas," in which Ms. Street uses maps as metaphor for human interaction. The infectious rhythm will have you hitting your CD player's repeat button, and Lexi's vocal delivery simply twists in wonderful new directions with each line. "Monday Morning" is a good mid-tempo introduction to her introspective world, a place best summarized in the title track, in which "the girl" takes a look around herself. "Bebe (Tasty)" is a melodic song in which Lexi does live up to her sexual image and let's her lover know what it's all about in a voice that could melt a man's heart at twenty paces. "Lover's Catastrophe" introduces a contrasting bit of darkness with it's hint of love's more masochistic side. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Beautiful South," in which Street marries some impressionistic lyrics with a stunningly controlled musical evocation of the languorous beauty of the South, y'all. Add some tasty organ licks, strings, and exotic rhythms, and you've entered the sensual world of Lexi Street.

No match for seeing them live, but then, when does a studio album do that? Until they tour in your area, this small masterpiece will have to do!