Review from CDNow
However unlikely it might seem at first, 29-year-old pop-soul singer Macy Gray is being billed as the logical heir to the currently missing-in-action Fiona Apple. Backed by the same management and production team that oversaw Apple's transition from an unknown gloomy waif to a famous gloomy waif, Gray has made a quirky and promising, if not necessarily overwhelming, debut.
Gray's sound, a freewheeling amalgam of '70s-styled funk, pop, and soul, is matched to a voice so scratchy and unpolished that her record label biography compares her to Bette Davis (no doubt a record industry first, and it's not hard to see their point). On On How Life Is, Gray, at her best, brings to mind Nina Simone – with samples. At her worst, she's a funkier Tina Turner, though it's unlikely Turner would have thought to sample from both the Fat Boys' "Human Beat Box" and DJ Shadow's "Entropy" (on the same song, no less).

Most of Life examines boyfriends that are always getting high, and one-night stands that never call. Gray writes about sex (most notably on the decidedly not subtle "Sex-o-matic") with an eye for detail that would impress Liz Phair; examines both carnality and spirituality in a way rarely done since the better days of Prince; and, with "I've Committed Murder," does what can be seen as a nifty, if unwitting, inversion of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car."

Gray sometimes seems the victim of her influences, of a no-doubt impressive record collection that's probably a little heavy on the Me'Shell NdegeOcello, and of her voice, appealingly scruffy at the record's beginning, but less so after about forty minutes. Life's commitment, though, never wavers and its air of street party conviviality never wanes.