She Pays the Rent

The rhythm on this one has a slight lurch to it, a rock and roll swagger that owes something to the earliest Chuck Berry recordings even as the organ gives it a more explicitly British Invasion coloring. The Lyres operate in a narrow tonal register but they work it expertly — the song has exactly the arrangement it needs, no more, and the economy is its own kind of sophistication. There is a slipperiness to the guitar tone, strings slightly raw against the harder attack of the rhythm section, and the whole thing sits in a frequency range that rewards loud playback in a small space. The lyrical subject is a power dynamic rendered in the bluntest possible terms — financial dependency, romantic leverage, the complicated currency of relationships — handled with the kind of unsentimental directness that garage rock favors. There is no moral framing offered; the song simply observes the situation and rides it. Conolly's voice has the slightly nasal quality common to this tradition, an anti-crooner aesthetic that privileges conviction over beauty, and it suits the material completely. The song ends before it has time to outstay its welcome, which is another form of discipline. This is music for the kind of bar where the jukebox still has singles on it, for the specific pleasure of hearing something that sounds like it was recorded forty years before it was, by people who meant every word of it.