Little Miss can’t be wrong This Fairchild's hotter than Morgan BY SAM PFEIFLE

To be honest, I was pretty sure Miss Fairchild was some kind of drag act. I pictured a 6’7" black man doing Donna Summer in a slinky, sequined red dress. (There’s a joke there — the kind inspired by this new Miss Fairchild album I’m listening to.)

Actually, it might be better for you to put this review down and just go buy the album (it seems to be called :Album) at your nearest Bull Moose, just on my general recommendation. Trying to figure out who made this thing is half the fun and I wouldn’t want to ruin it. Once you find out this mysterious girl is actually a side-project of three pretty familiar white boys (two of them from Nantucket!), it takes on a whole new dimension altogether, but some of the sheen sure does rub off.

First, there’s Wrall Skillz. Someone tell me how this one kid can do all three parts of Aretha’s diner backup singers in the Blues Brothers, along with Aretha herself, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Cab Calloway, for that matter. The vocal range itself is impressive, but there’s the added effort of tackling the task in the first place. There’s as much theater here as trippin’ beats. Skillz so inhabits these personas that you buy in — it’s Bel Biv Devoe, De La Soul, Curtis Mayfield, Parliament — as long as you don’t listen too closely. And they’re playing new tunes; they’ve contemporized their sound; they’re conscious of their place in the musical world and they don’t take themselves very seriously.

P.Nice, the producer/DJ who runs the Difference, teams with his long-time collaborator Todd "The Rocket" Richard (seriously) to supply the atmosphere. They not only create the beats, percussion, keyboards, and everything else that makes this irresistibly pop, but they record everything, too, acting as engineers, producers, and musicians in a way that’s not unique but is very rarely of this quality.

Organic claps, snaps, and congas are intimately linked by the most digital programming you can imagine, sounds not at all from nature, millions of firing ones and zeros producing fat, groggy skronks, shimmering chimes, and deadly hooks. Vocal tracks are layered on vocal tracks are layered on vocal tracks, lyrics as much beats as content. Only cold, cold winters and long, long nights produce songs like these, obsessed over and fine-tuned for countless hours.

Luckily, you can really enjoy it because Miss Fairchild don’t even expect you to take it all that seriously. Half the album is presented as a dream, or a big fat lie, and the rest is interspersed with cut-ups and sketches that call out all possible pretentious tension (although the witty hiding of the sketches somehow makes them not show up as tracks or time on the CD, it also makes them annoyingly impossible to program out of a listening experience — as I always say about sketches on an album, the fiftieth listen is not kind to them).

Though there’s a fractured and distended "Needle Drop" that opens the album, the true introduction comes with the "Ladies and gentleman, my name is P.Nice" that announces the beginning of the faux Miss Fairchild world tour to the faux audience in "Foreign Lands."

Skillz busts out his best "Three Is the Magic Number"-era De La Soul — crisp and affected, though maybe slightly low in the mix — and the groove in back is bouncy like a used-up car spring. Sure, the song could use a chorus, too, but the fact that it answers the charge that "Nantucket’s for rich folks" fairly inventively and finishes with some nice cutting that masks P. Nice saying "Wrall, Wrall, Wrall - wake up" is plenty of saving grace.

There’s substantial irony to go around: "Wrall, you gotta quit with all your dreams," Nice trails off as he tells him to get his ass to the studio for some work. Only their wildest dreams have them doing this for a living.

The real standout pop anthem, easily a top-40 hit in any fair and just world, is "One of Those Girls," possessed of a guitar hook that people dream about writing, simply arcing up and then down about a thousand times without getting annoying. Skillz excels as his "hard" self, still pretty much a tenor (and, of course, still supplying the falsetto "backup" singers).

You get the idea with a couplet like, "It’s kind of like Monop-o-lay/ The way you buying up the proper-tay."

Then we get a standard eight-bar, smooth, drop-in rap from Lipshitz (seriously) for the bridge, but it gets in and out smoothly and succinctly and gets the heart racing. The tune finishes up with some soaring horns, apparently synthetic, elevating the song to an orchestral affair, bursting with energy.

Or how about the funked-up "Hot Sauce," pumping a serious chorus, with the deep call to the tenor response (all Skillz, remember)? The story’s about a guy trying to get a gal in the sack after dinner, dropping an aphrodisiacal hot sauce on her that "will have you seeing double and it’ll get your body sweating." The waxing vixen is played by Nadiyah Kelly, who must be a really good sport to not have cracked up during every take at the Lothario lines being cheesily dropped all around her. But cheese and hot sauce work pretty well together.

The flute line from the Great Dunlap wins over any doubters to this song’s seriousness, though, lending a necessary warmth and sophistication before giving way to a pretty ripping guitar break at the 4:50 mark. And then the horn breakdown finish is simply awesome.

But, like I said, you shouldn’t have read all this shit. Just let Miss Fairchild wash right over you. She’ll treat you right. Just like a 6’7" black man doing Donna Summer in a slinky, sequined red dress.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at spfeifle@phx.com

Miss Fairchild play a CD-release party, with KGB, Sontiago, Bread, jdwalker, Nomar Slevik, Brzowski, Gabe FM, DJ Mayonnaise, DJ Rew, and Moshe, at the Big Easy, in Portland, on Thursday, Nov. 18. Call (207) 871-8817.