Lesley Roy Is Going… Into The Embrace Of Dr. Luke And The Viper Room

“Avril Lavigne crossed with Melissa Etheridge a Psycho Bitch?,” asked an intriguing headline at antimusic.com a few months back; unfortunately, this referred to no particular psycho-bitchy activities accomplished by this extremely blonde pop-singing 21-year-old Dublin pop-singer’s daughter, but a mere song title. But Lesley Roy is still young, so don’t write her off yet. Her $7.99-on-iTunes Jive debut album Unbeautiful debuted at No. 128 on Heatseekers this week, a month or so after it officially hit stores. The title ballad, meanwhile, racked up its eighth week on the Pop 100 chart, where it’s now at No. 71; back in June, her comparatively less boring “I’m Gone, I’m Going” did just about equally well at the same format, reportedly after being played on The Hills.

The video to that one features Lesley with too much goth black-eye makeup, packing her bags and guitar out in the middle of nowhere (beach community? factory town? farm town? suburbia? all four?? confusing!), apparently fleeing some boy she’s so over, driving away in her totally cool yellow Jeep. Her singing is sandpaper-tinged and pleasantly unsubtle; genre is Kelly Clarkson-style bubblegrunge power ballad. So when the chorus kicks in, she’s fronting her band in the sand, pretending to thrash away angrily at her guitar. Then eventually the air clears and Lesley “won’t look back no more,” until she finally winds up at her ultimate escape destination–Open Mic Night at the Viper Room! Lesley’s fans find such scenarios helpful: “I’m having a few issues with my boyfriend at the moment and I find that I can relate to whole lot of the songs on the CD,” writes one friend from Houston on her MySpace page. Though another in Wisconsin has searched Wal-Mart and Target and they’re not carrying the album, and she’s “gonna freak” if she doesn’t find one. As may you, once you note you how many famous writers chipped in–Max Martin, Dr. Luke, Desmond Child, Kara DioGuardi, Dianne Warren… I mean, who else is there?

Lesley Roy [MySpace]