Review | Fenne Lily – Win Win

Label: Nettwerk Music Group

By Charlie Pinhey

The cover of ‘Win Win’ is striking. The shot of Fenne Lily from the perspective of inside a dog’s mouth is sure to stand out on shelves, and even if you haven’t seen in record shops, it stands out as picture in its own right. The power of a good cover came up in our interview with Lily, “I have this mission with album covers that they shouldn’t fly under the radar. An album cover is important. I had a covid record, where I didn’t have any options to pick from, which made me sad. So since then, I’ve made it a thing that I pay attention to album covers, because they’re a piece of art in themselves.”

At one point, one of the names floating around for ‘Win Win’ was ‘Off The Bone’, which would have represented the unsettled state Lily was in whilst this album was being put together just as well as ‘Win Win‘. During this period Lily had a relationship come to an end and subsequently moved to New York. Opening track ‘Uh-Huh’ gives a retrospective, placid nod to the changes going on in her life at the time, whilst also realising that love could be on the horizon from someone else. ‘Uh-Huh’ is a beautiful opener with Lily’s near-whispered harmonies and Americana-inspired drums. Both hesitantly welcome the listener in through a creaking and vulnerable door and lets them stay a while.

Second track ‘Room To Room’ features some brilliantly heart-wrenching lyrics. The track is written about the loss of one of Lily’s family dogs and the other being left wandering from room to room looking for their companion. The track plods with the same tempo of the weighty steps of the remaining grief-stricken animal. The subject matter eventually bleeds back into the breakup situation driven by a favourite lyric of Lily’s, ‘And he’ll think this one’s about him too. Like a lot of what he hears, I guess.’ Similarly snappy is a line from closing track ‘In Life And On Planes’, ‘You say you feel stupid, well so do I for holding you one last time while you cry and waving off the taxi as you go. Now I know everything I know.‘

I was dumbfounded to find out from Fenne Lily that the brass section in the outro to third track ‘Sleeping’ is not actually a brass section at all. It is instead the voice of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Isaac Stalling double tracked with a fretless baritone guitar. If nothing else, this section alone is the perfect summation of the level of collective musicianship on display in this record. It’s a swirling addition to the album that prompts surrender.

Standing apart from songs, melodically, on the album is ‘Stranger Things’, a somewhat chirpy addition to the album and brimming with a crisp autumnal energy and is up there with Madeleine Peyroux’s ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love.’ This track in particular does a neat job of guiding the listener through the periods of change in Lily’s life, as well as prompting introspection from the listener.

Fenne Lily has said that she hopes people take a degree of satisfaction from ‘Win Win’ and it’s through rousing tracks later on in the album, such as ‘Thank You Sorry’ that round off this record as one of her most complete sets of work to date.

I’d say that’s job done!