Aversion.com
February 2003

Brains are like money: You don’t see anyone with a lot of either making a big deal out of having them. Just like the blatant display of flashy furs and gold jewelry, rattling off inane facts, trivia and intellectual one-upsmanship shows that somebody’s accounts – either monetary or mental – are probably just about tapped out. It’s all about security, baby, a lesson Puff Daddy, the nuveau-riche and a million obscurantists desperately need to learn.

Snowy’s Bonni Evensen is the sort of songwriter who doesn’t need to whip out every trick in her arsenal to placate a fragile ego that demands her listeners understand her brainy powers. Listeners, at least the ones worth worrying about, will figure it out quickly in Lilywhite. While Evensen sports a voice that’s easily confused with that of Aimee Mann, Snowy’s got more than just a pretty voice under its hood: Whip-smart pop songwriting goes to work in each tune. Evensen doesn’t need to drill it into our heads that she’s got the skills, however, as she forgoes the nods to forgotten ’60s pop icons, experimental song structures, weird dynamic shifts or any of the other various "hey, look at me!" clues.

Instead, she just lets the songs speak for themselves. From a melody that puts some hard edges on dream-pop melodies and occasional bursts of electric guitar accents, making a song that’s perfect for a dreary afternoon ("Pills"); to a strangely textured mix of a faraway drum loop, guitar noise and deliberate piano chords that lives up to the chill in Snowy’s name ("Headful of Dreams"), Lilywhite is a scrapbook collection of deep, textured pop numbers.

Amid all the rose-petal-soft melodies, it’s tempting to overlook some of this album’s low points: Evensen hasn’t broken out as a songwriter to the extent that she can make all her songs as lovely as her most effective tracks, and even then, outside of a handful of songs, there’s a remarkable similarity between most tracks on Lilywhite as to make them almost interchangeable.