Music Review: Sam Phillips, “Don’t Do Anything” (Nonesuch)
Rating: 84
Two decades after abdicating her Contemporary Christian career as Leslie Phillips to become a high priestess of alternative pop, Sam Phillips still mesmerizes with melodic beauty and lyrical bite. As the female equivalent to Elvis Costello, Phillips can lacerate with her words while those honeyed melodies soothe, and her seventh secular disc, “Don’t Do Anything,” is full of such events — it is the first disc since her divorce from longtime producer T-Bone Burnett.
But while there are hints at anger, especially in the first words heard on “No Explanations” (“I thought if he understood, he wouldn’t treat me this way”) and the ghostly “Another Song” (“Did you ever love me?”), spite is not the overarching theme. But she’s clearly looking back at the wreckage: in “My Career in Chemistry,” Phillips sings “You’re the chemical that never did wear off” before a lyrical sigh: “Some experiment.”
Self-producing for the first time, Phillips gives “Don’t Do Anything” an elegant avant-pop sound that splits the difference between the baroque Beatleisms of “Martinis and Bikinis” and the pared-down “Fan Dance.” She reclaims “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” the jangler she contributed to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Burnett-produced “Raising Sand,” delivering it with more bounce and less humid dread than the golden god and goddess displayed. Phillips is a widely unknown national treasure, but “Don’t Do Anything” delivers what her cheeky, cut-and-paste liner notes promise: “moods and diversions of a natural star,” and “a high degree of male hanky-panky.”
– GL
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