Rating: 4 stars
Hearing Sam Phillips's new album is like watching the world disappear into a magician's top hat. We know it can't really fit but we can't decide whether the sleight-of-hand is an illusion, or a way of showing truths we hadn't noticed. The scenes she describes seem to have evaporated the moment before the songs begin, yet they linger for a long time.
"The places I go are never there," she sings in Taking Pictures. We don't know those places either, but in Phillips's songs we recognize them at once. They're shabby and mysterious. Their walls are stained with tired smoky exhalations. But they also feel festive, like a dusty jukebox when the quarter drops.
The title track presents a dispirited scene -- "I use my blindfold to dry the tears" -- then opens into a baggy Tin-Pan Alley version of a Chinese dance, with guitars plucking drily at a pentatonic scale. "When I do the fan dance, I'm firecracker lightning, I burn with no trace up in the cool sky." The sepia sadness of the tune and the wiry intimacy of Phillips' voice, capture that moment of sweet nothingness as precisely as a camera's shutter.
Phillips began her career as a Christian-music singer, moved toward a dark and brainy form of pop, and made several albums for Virgin with her producer-husband, T-Bone Burnett. The 1996 record Omnipop: It's Just a Fleshwound, Lambchop failed commercially, and Phillips was let go.
With her debut album for Nonesuch, she has found her way back, or discovered new ways to take us where she wanted to go anyway. Her 12 new songs are full of detonations that come from a place far beneath the surface. The lyrics feel like the fiery residue left after all the in-between words have been scorched away. The melodies are lean and invasive, and sly as cats.
Say What You Mean is songwriting at absolute ground-zero. No tune could be plainer, or more magnetic. No words could be simpler, and less open to paraphrase. It's a slow sashay onto the soul's killing ground, where pleasure and pain are almost indistinguishable.
Incinerator takes a scant two minutes to create a perfect romance noir, casual and deadly. It's music for a late hour, while the cigarette turns to ash on someone's finger, with Phillips as the ash. Like some other great cabaret singers, she has a knack for personalizing and dissociating all at once -- of singing to you, and right through you as well.
Phillips and Burnett have smoked up a dark instrumental haze for much of this material, with sparse but suggestive offerings from guitarist Marc Ribot, singer and bassist Gillian Welch, and string arranger Van Dyke Parks, who deploys a trio of polyphonic cellos for Wasting My Time. Matching Phillips's alto with so many bottom-heavy arrangements poses some risks, but they're all worth taking. This is a great album.