NYLON - March 2009 - (Page 164) radar: best, brightest OBI BEST WAS not the first name Alex Lilly chose for her Los Angeles-based indie-pop band. Shortly after moving to L.A. from San Francisco, where she’d earned a degree in music composition, Lilly began playing around town with a variety of collaborators as Colorforms, eventually earning the attention of Inara George of the Bird and the Bee, who enlisted Lilly as a keyboardist and backup singer. But when Lilly signed her own deal with Social Science Recordings and began preparing for the release of Capades, Obi Best’s debut full-length, The Man came calling: University Games, the toy company that manufactures Colorforms, demanded Lilly fork over $1,000 to borrow its trademark for a year. And that wasn’t all. sprightly alex lilly leaves the bird-and-the-bee nest to eke out her own identity as obi best. by mikael wood. photographed by bryan sheffield “They also wanted to make sure the album cover wouldn’t be too sinister,” Lilly says, sipping tea on the patio of a Silver Lake coffee shop. “I was like, Well, that probably won’t happen, but if I end up going through a downward spiral of depression and want to put a decapitated goat head on the cover, I don’t want to worry about it, you know? I want to keep my options open.” Thus was born Obi Best, a handle that Lilly says unites her interest in the Japanese language and her love of “second-grade rhetoric” (as in, “You’re the best!”). Thankfully, Lilly has thus far staved off depression, so the cover of Capades features no goat head, decapitated or otherwise. But the album does illustrate the value she places on options: Obi Best’s music is a shape-shifting swirl of jazzy piano tinkles, noisy guitar squall, airy vocals, and space-age synth squiggles. The material shares much in common with that of the Bird and the Bee—both acts’ music feels old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time, for one—though B&B multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin is quick to point out, “Alex has her own voice, for sure.” And it’s one with no shortage of youthful quirk; occasionally, Capades can feel like a grown-up version of a high-school musical. “It’s hard for some people to be a part of a group and to do their own thing,” he says, “but she’s really good at both.” In Lilly’s view, Obi Best resides somewhere in the gray area between a “songwriter persona” and a proper band: She writes the tunes and calls most of the shots, but readily acknowledges that input from her collaborators (among them, guitarist Oscar Schedin, drummer Barbara Gruska, and bassist Bram Inscore, the latter of whom also plays with Beck) helps define the music. “What’s happened is that I have a group of friends, and we all really like each others’ bands,” she explains. “I feel like band is almost becoming an obsolete word, at least in L.A. It’s more like a collective of people where we all know each others’ songs.” Offers Inscore, “Alex encourages us to take a lot of liberties, so that it kind of just becomes its own thing.” This spring Lilly will pull double duty on the road, touring with the Bird and the Bee and opening the gigs as Obi Best. The balancing act doesn’t intimidate her, though. In fact, she says that working as a sidewoman for George and Kurstin has given her the perspective to become a better bandleader when she is running the show. Besides, she says with a laugh, “it’s fun to accommodate people’s wishes.” Unless, of course, they belong to The Man.
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