Has John Lennon been dead long enough for somebody to inherit his caustic spirit? If not, don't tell Sam Phillips. On her new album, Martinis and Bikinis, Phillips pays homage to Lennon through dead-on Beatlesque melodies, guitar riffs, song structures, production techniques, and vocals, all of which she weds to her own cryptic lyrics about the Search for Truth.
But Phillips, who scored critical raves with two previous albums, The Indescribable Wow" and "Cruel Inventions" (this is her fifth record, produced like the last three by her husband, T-Bone Burnett), doesn't so much copy Lennon; it's as if she had his hologram stamped on her soul and then picked up where he left off. Her imagery is at once brittle and dreamy, her passion strong yet dry. And her anger is consistently palpable ("Our madness envy and desire / Ring you with an unforgiving fire," from Circle of Fire) even if her vulnerability is only sometimes visible ("Control is letting go / And I'm always the last to know," from When I Fall).
Flirting at times with ersatz psychedelia (Same Rain, in which the wash of background vocals thrillingly approximates new Beatles harmonies), Phillips's music isn't as nearly as immediately as hummable or tuneful as the early Beatles classics (she zeros in mainly on the Strawberry Fields / Sgt. Pepper era). But she gets closest to that kind of melodic appeal with I Need Love, a direct plea for a real emotional response in which she sounds spookily like Lennon, and on the George Harrisonesque Baby I Can't Please You, an exercise in Indian influence (tabla and something that sounds very akin to a sitar) in which she calls a romantic poseur on the carpet.
Fittingly, Phillips closes with Lennon's own Gimme Some Truth, which re-iterates what she's said elsewhere in the album. Her vocal here is bold, bleating, and desperate. And anybody who can pull this song off (dated lyrics and all) with such power deserves to be considered the fifth Beatle, even if she declares (unconvincingly) in here press material that she "wasn't that familiar with John Lennon's albums." The bottom line, of course, is that Martinis is a very cool record.