CD Reviews

Grant- Lee Phillips

Strangelet | Zoë

By MIKAEL WOOD | April 30, 2007

3.0 Stars

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

Topics: CD Reviews , The Beatles, Grant-Lee Phillips, Grant-Lee Phillips, More

| More

See more deals

view all

[ 05/26 ] "A Natural Order," photographs by Lucas Foglia @ David Winton Bell Gallery

[ 05/26 ] George Orwell's 1984, adapted by Nick Lane @ Gamm Theatre

[ 05/26 ] "2012 RISD Graduate Thesis Exhibition" @ Rhode Island Convention Center

ARTICLES BY MIKAEL WOOD

THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS | FURTHER | July 07, 2010
Astralwerks (2010)

DEVO | SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY | July 01, 2010
Given the theory of de-evolution these Ohio brainiacs began expounding more than 30 years ago, it makes a sad kind of sense that Devo's first album since 1990's Smooth Noodle Maps offers such a charmless, base-level version of the band's synth-addled new wave.

TAIO CRUZ | ROKSTARR | June 24, 2010
When Taio Cruz sings, "I can't live without you," in "Take Me Back," pop-song conventions tell us he's referring to a lover.

THE FUTUREHEADS | THE CHAOS | June 16, 2010
"I wish that I could stop the noise," sings Barry Hyde not long into The Chaos . It sure doesn't seem that way.

BETTYE LAVETTE | INTERPRETATIONS: THE BRITISH ROCK SONGBOOK | June 01, 2010
Bettye LaVette’s previous two albums had titles that required a little digging to unpack.