Before KiKi Holli was a rock singer, she was an actress. She grew up in Pittsburgh, earned a BFA in voice and theater, and got her first national attention co-writing and starring in Forever Dusty: The Dusty Springfield Musical, which opened Off-Broadway and drew notices from The New York Times, The Village Voice, Reuters, and Out. She made her name, in other words, playing someone else. That turns out to be the most useful fact to carry into Something About You, the five-song EP she released recently with her band, the Remedy.
The record is short, 18 minutes, and built with real care. Ethan Allen, a two-time Grammy nominee whose credits run through Ben Harper, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Tricky, produced, mixed and co-wrote all five songs. Dave Collins, who has mastered for Madonna, Soundgarden and Alice Cooper, handled the mastering. The band name Stevie Nicks, David Bowie, Prince and the Cure as touchstones, and you can hear the case being argued: dream-pop atmosphere on one side, dark wave weight on the other, the two kept in balance rather than allowed to collapse into each other.
The title track opens and establishes the method. Holli sings it with more restraint than force, and Allen’s production surrounds the voice with texture without crowding it out. It is an inviting three minutes. It is also, as the British site Real Gone observed, a song whose hook does not land on first contact. That is a fair criticism, and it applies to more than one track here. This is a record that asks for repeat plays before it gives anything up.
“The Garden” is the best of KiKi Holli’s own songs. It trades the opener’s synths for acoustic guitar and a drum groove that pulls the arrangement toward indie rock, stacks layered harmonies across the pre-chorus, and brings strings in late. There is a lightness to it that the rest of the EP does not attempt.
Then comes “Don’t Change”, and the record shifts gear entirely. The song belongs to INXS, the closing track from their 1983 album Shabooh Shoobah, and it has always been one of their finest. Holli and Allen strip out everything that made it a stadium song—the propulsion, the size, the urgency—and rebuild it as a slow torch ballad over finger-picked acoustic guitar and droning keys. What remains is the melody and the voice, and the voice is considerable. Real Gone called the cover the EP’s crowning glory and reached for Lana Del Rey as a comparison, which is close enough. The same reviewer noted, plainly, that it outshines Holli’s own compositions.
That verdict is worth sitting with rather than waving off. KiKi Holli is a gifted interpreter. She knows how to enter a lyric someone else wrote, find the ache underneath it, and deliver it as though the words cost her something. It is the same skill that made Forever Dusty work on stage. What Something About You quietly reveals is that her songwriting has not caught up to that instinct, that the material she writes gives her less to act on than the material she borrows.
“So Far Away” comes closest to closing the gap. It is the EP’s most direct treatment of absence, and it moves with more energy than anything around it, upbeat guitars riding a bass line with real groove. “Brand New Day,” under three minutes, ends things on the rock-fueled lift the sequencing has been building toward, and it is the one track where Holli sounds unguarded rather than composed.
Something About You is well made, patiently sequenced, and carried by an instrument worth the price of admission on its own. It also will not convert anyone on first listen; it does not have the hooks for that and does not appear to want them. The open question is whether KiKi Holli can write a song as good as the one she covers. On the evidence of “The Garden”, she is closer than this EP quite lets on.