Consumer Guide Album

Lily Allen: Sheezus [Warner Bros., 2014]
The key's in a multivalent lyric she balances with a surehandedness that isn't guaranteed the way it was when she was single: "Life for Me," a tuneful rendering among many tuneful renderings (hell, all five bonus misses are tuneful) about feeling nostalgic for the discontented days marital bliss has put behind her forever, or so she usually thinks. Even when that bliss devolves into a painful argument, she can put it into song, and though the bite that was her premarital specialty has softened, give her credit--marital bliss is a theme few lyricists sharpen much at all. Opposites that attract: "Our Time," in which single working girls get wasted on Friday night, and the scornful celebrity-feminist "Hard Out Here." A-