Sam Phillips
Omnipop (It's Only a Flesh Wound Lambchop)
Virgin Recprds
Release Date: 1996
Ever noticed that the baby boomers have diluted, whitewashed and otherwise sanitized the legends of the '60s as they have made the pilgrimage from free-love children to boardroom sluts? Hell, even Jane Fonda married a billionaire and disappeared into the realm of the rich and apathetic. Fact is, most people grow more and more conservative with time.
Fortunately, not everyone travels that route, or else the world would not be graced with Sam Phillips' new album, Omnipop (It's Only a Flesh Wound Lambchop). Phillips just gets weirder with age.
Back in the day, Phillips was (at least musically) about as conservative as they come. A Christian contemporary singer operating under the name Leslie Phillips, she worked in a genre not exactly famous for its musical innovations.
Eventually, she felt stifled and decided a makeover was in order. Since changing her name and entering the secular music world, she has released three fine albums, culminating in her 1994 breakthrough Martinis and Bikinis
, with its string of minor hits: "Same Changes," "Baby I Can't Please You," and "I Need Love."
Her most recognizable trademark has always been -- and continues to be -- her voice, with its Stevie Nicks rasp and sultry overtones. Her unique phrasing borrows from blues, jazz and rock without committing to any of them, which adds an extra layer of meaning to her lyrics. Martinis and Bikinis laid that voice over dark, soulful, occasionally apocryphal tunes of loss, confusion, and longing both personal and spiritual. Phillips is a master of contradiction; she walks the fault line between heart-rending emotion and no-nonsense shit-kicking with clarity and precision.
Her inexplicably titled fourth secular album pushes the boundaries of genre with truly tuneful pop melodies that lead to nowhere. While fans of
Martinis and Bikinis (and we all should be, really) will recognize seeds of that album in "Power World" and "Your Hands," they'll also find Phillips' new directions interesting to say the least.
Genre-bending is Omnipop's prime modus operandi. Whether on the nutty tick-tock bop of "Plastic is Forever," the hokey luau sounds of "Zero Zero Zero," or the souped-up electric folk of "Slapstick Heart" (co-written with the members of R.E.M.), Phillips risks novelty--the death of many a talented band. Novelty is style with no pretensions to substance.
She doesn't fall into that trap. The genre tricks she uses aren't there to draw your attention; they're games for Phillips to play. She takes on cliches just to see if she can make them sound non-gimmicky. After all, you gotta expect some degree of weirdness from anyone married to a man named T-Bone -- Burnett, in this case, who is also her producer and sometime guest musician.
A truly talented act is one that never lets you hear everything the first time around. A song that is laid out all nice and neat is a song you'll get bored with fast. No one can ever accuse Sam Phillips of being boring, and
Omnipop will further her career as a talented songwriter to whom "conservative" is just another 12-letter word.
-- Lindy Powell
powell@outersound.com
