When Kurt Heasley finally abandons his mercurial guitar-pop project Lilys, it'll take a savvy compiler to assemble an anthology that makes sense of everywhere he's been. There is a continuous path through Lilys' periodic advances and retreats, but only a few songs on each album really fit into the seamless whole. On Everything Wrong Is Imaginary, the best place to start is "With Candy," a curt, disjointed avant-rock song that features some of the stinging garage guitar of Heasley's overtly retro period, some of the dreamy sound-waves of his early work, and some new forays into electronica. "With Candy" is mainly of a piece with other Lilys songs in the way it splinters and bends pop convention, making distortion, atonality, and stunted riffs into something weird and beautiful.
Heasley and producer Michael Musmanno—who fleshed out Heasley's demos after the rocker got mired in a family crisis—play with a variety of progressive sounds on Everything Wrong Is Imaginary, starting with the album-opening "Black Carpet Magic," which jumps from wiggy noise to wiggy noise while maintaining a tight post-punk frame, reminiscent of early New Order. Later, Lilys try some smoothed-out funk on "A Diana's Diana," which sounds like an Ariel Pink song without the lo-fi haze, and they revisit Heasley's My Bloody Valentine fandom on "Where The Night Goes" and "The Night Sun Over San Juan," which have the foggy feeling and accidental tunefulness that have been the band's trademarks. Everything Wrong Is Imaginary is loosely and playfully conceived, but the stylistic goofing can't hide the exposed, bloody vein that runs throughout, culminating in the acoustic finale "Scott Free," where Heasley's rage and sorrow are distilled into a single, hopeful sentence: "This is where I get off."