Grant- Lee Phillips

Strangelet | Zoë
By MIKAEL WOOD  |  April 30, 2007
3.0 3.0 Stars
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On his new solo album, this LA-based singer-songwriter — the former frontman of mid-’90s psych-folkies Grant Lee Buffalo — sings about the fountain of youth running dry. Yet that’s a prospect Grant-Lee Phillips’s albums make you start to doubt. Although the world around him keeps changing, Phillips’s stuff always stays the same; Strangelet, the follow-up to a dashed-off 2006 covers disc, seems like the work of a man who hasn’t aged a day since he figured out what kind of music he wanted to make. Phillips’s sound is a durable one: folky, post-Beatles chord progressions caked in liberal amounts of T. Rex guitar fuzz. And here he comes up with a handful of winners that include “Hidden Hand,” which stomps with a sexy sneer, and “Soft Asylum (No Way Out),” whose bright jangle channels Out of Time–era R.E.M. Over its dozen tracks, however, Strangelet begins to blur into one extended alt-rock echo. It’s as if the price of Phillips’s eternal youth were an old man’s taste.

Grant-Lee Phillips + Kim Taylor | Paradise Rock Club, 967 Comm Ave, Boston | May 8 | 617.931.2000
Related: Grant Lee Phillips, On the racks: June 27, 2006, Dead of Winter + Fiery Furnaces, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , The Beatles, Grant-Lee Phillips, Grant-Lee Phillips,  More more >
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