Phil Stacey

Lyric Street
By MIKAEL WOOD  |  May 6, 2008
1.0 1.0 Stars
staceyinside
Around my house, we referred to this Season 6 American Idol loser as Nosferatu, a nickname that the dude’s outré bald-vampire steez guarantees we weren’t alone in using. No coincidence that Phil Stacey was interesting on Idol only when he sang songs that emphasized his creepiness — “Every Breath You Take,” for instance, or LeAnn Rimes’s “I Need You.” Unfortunately, on his homonymous debut, he seems intent on proving that, hey, he’s just a regular guy with regular-guy concerns. “You can walk on water/You can walk on the moon,” he sings over good-time guitars in the opener, “When the walkin’ is over at the end of the road/It ain’t what you’ve done, son, it’s who you know.” Gee, who knew Hollywood was such a tough town? The result is one of the Idol franchise’s dullest outings yet, a scared-straight pop-country bore that shares more with Taylor Hicks’s vanilla-bean white-soul bomb than with Bucky Covington’s bat-shit Southern-rock disc. Come back, Kellie Pickler, all is forgiven!
Related: Soul brothers, Portland scene report, April 14, 2006, Jay Reatard | Watch Me Fall, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , Kellie Pickler, LeAnn Rimes, Taylor Hicks
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY MIKAEL WOOD
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   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.

 See all articles by: MIKAEL WOOD