By BRIAN ORLOFF, JOSH KORR and CHRIS TISCH
Published May 16, 2004
SAM PHILLIPS, A BOOT AND A SHOE (NONESUCH) Sam Phillips has made quite an evolution, from Christian crooner to bubbly, postmodern pop star to her latest, and most satisfying incarnation, sophisticated folkie. Phillips began to explore more spare territory on 2001's stunning Fan Dance. Her latest album, A Boot and a Shoe, continues to mine the low-key sound with elegance and subdued grace.
Songs unfurl with an insouciance that might border on complete detachment if delivered by a lesser singer, but Phillips' rich, gritty singing invests her tunes with a quiet desperation that grows more arresting with each listen. The 40-minute song cycle benefits from economical orchestration. An occasional piano line plays foil to finger-picked acoustic guitar work and an occasional violin riff.
Highlights include the relentless All Night, with its percussive, boot-stomping backdrop. And If I Could Write underscores Phillips' resignation with a spiraling, haunting refrain. A-
- BRIAN ORLOFF, Times correspondent
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MODEST MOUSE, GOOD NEWS FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE BAD NEWS (SONY) Modest Mouse's new album is really three albums in one.
The best one is full of spacey, expansive songs driven by chiming, echoing electric guitar riffs. The riffs fall between the overwhelming earnestness of U2 and Coldplay and the straight-faced absurdity of the Flaming Lips. There's no Sunday Bloody Sunday but no flies buzzing around Japanese robots, either.
Float On, Ocean Breathes Salty and The World at Large ring with Isaac Brock's restlessness. "If the world's at large, why should I remain? Walked away to another plan. Gonna find another place, maybe one I can stand," he sings to perfect music for an IMAX movie about a road trip through some dusty, ice-age-carved canyons in Utah or Nevada.
The second album is built on jagged guitar slashes and Brock's yelps, something like a slightly more controlled version of the Pixies. The yearning and searching break down, and a feverish lunacy starts to take hold. On Dance Hall, Brock becomes unhinged, growling the nonsense fragment "I'm gonna dance all Dance Hall every day," over and over.
Album No. 3 finds the narrator of The World at Large caught in some apocalyptic limbo on the way to that other place. Bukowski, with a rat-a-tat delivery, accordion and plinked banjo, evokes a drunken pub version of Tarantella from the musical Peter Pan. The gibbering horns and cracked-up phrases of This Devil's Workday ("Gonna take this sack of puppies. Gonna set it out to freeze. Gonna climb around on all fours till all the blood falls out my knees.") belong in a tent next to Tom Waits at the carnival from hell.
The three parts don't quite hold together, but Brock does his best to keep things from falling to pieces.
With a half-lisp that at times makes him sound like Sylvester the cat, Brock exudes a vulnerability and an openness that carry through the divergent tracks. His careful enunciation and perpetual excess of saliva are as endearing as they were for Linus in the 1960s Charlie Brown cartoons. And unlike on The Moon and Antarctica, the band's first disc for a major label, he never gets mushed into the background.
There's a word for all this, one that seems almost alien these days: growth.
Good News for People Who Love Bad News is really the soundtrack of a band unafraid to find and refine its voice. Compared with The Moon and Antarctica, Good News' melodies are prettier, the songs tighter, the production cleaner. The thrashy songs have far more Isaac Brock than Black Francis, and the Flaming Lips show up on The Good Times Are Killing Me as peers rather than instructors.
As long as Modest Mouse keeps going down that road, the band is sure to come up with an album soon that's as good as its parts. A-
- JOSH KORR, Time staff writer
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THE VINES, WINNING DAYS (CAPITOL) The aggressive songs on the Vines' debut, Highly Evolved, prompted many to categorize the band as just another Nirvana knockoff. But the album's softer songs, awash in gorgeous harmony and moody guitars, separated the Australian band from other groups channeling Kurt Cobain.
Perhaps the Vines recognized that as they planned their followup, Winning Days. Though the album has a few rockets that tip over the furniture, much of it is tender.
Opener Ride packs a nice wallop, as does second track Animal Machine, which jumps with angst and vigor. The third track, TV Pro, begins as a slow curtain of beautiful harmony, then bucks fluidly into an aggressive rant on celebrity worship.
Then things slow for a while. The album's midsection offers delicate tracks that, unfortunately, aren't as strong as the dirges from the debut. So the album grows sluggish. As much as one may appreciate the Vines' gentler efforts, they seem like an overdose. It's tough to go seven tracks without hearing one of volatile lead singer Craig Nicholls' great, guttural screams.
But they reappear on the album's last track, F-- the World, a fierce, chaotic number that is as strong as anything the Vines have done on either of their albums. The song's coda is a crashing blend of Nicholls' screams, signing off the album with a great blast of anger that still doesn't sound much like Nirvana. B+
