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Anyone who rues the scarcity of smart, serious pop music for grown-ups should snap up the entire Sam Phillips catalog. On second thought, skip "Omnipop." But don't miss Phillips's splendid new effort, "Don't Do Anything," a collection that dances in her signature mystery space between darkness and light with strange grace, emotional candor, and winsome hooks.

"I thought if he understood/ He wouldn't treat me this way" goes the album's opening salvo, and it's hard not to read between the lines into Phillips's split from her husband and longtime collaborator, T Bone Burnett. This is the first Sam Phillips album not produced by Burnett; the artist herself has taken over at the helm, and she has learned well.

After two spare, atmospheric cabaret albums, "Don't Do Anything" is a return to a fleshed-out, and endlessly imaginative, band sound. On the haunting lead track, "No Explanations," Phillips's poised melody rides a fearsome jumble of hand drums and fuzzed-out electric guitar, and similar collisions of dissonance and delicacy colors the collection.

Her love affair with Beatles-esque pop resurfaces in the title track, "My Career in Chemistry," and "Flowers Up." Meanwhile, the earthy chanteuse familiar from Phillips's recent records emerges on ominous, waltzing "Signal"; dapper "Can't Come Down"; and "Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us." The latter song was a forlorn dirge in the hands of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, who recorded it for last year's "Raising Sand."

But it's a saucy celebration as sung by the woman who hit bottom, heard the call, and penned this battle cry: "The sight of my heart has left me again/ But I hear music up above."

- bostonglobe.com

T Bone Burnett played a major role in Sam Phillips' recording career before she even became Sam Phillips. Their collaboration began when Burnett produced 1987's The Turning, Phillips' last album as Leslie Phillips, the given name she used when she signed with the Christian-oriented Myrrh Records label. After that album, Phillips fled the constraints of the CCM format and, using her nickname Sam Phillips, began recording a series of gorgeous pop albums with Burnett at the controls that posed moral and ethical riddles with subtle passion, wisdom, and no small degree of wit. However, with the release of Phillips' 2004 album, A Boot and a Shoe, came the word that Phillips and Burnett, who were husband and wife as well as musical collaborators, had divorced, and her seventh album as Sam Phillips, Don't Do Anything, finds her producing her own sessions for the first time. Those expecting a major shift in creative direction will not really find what they're looking for; while the sound of the record is not as spare as Fan Dance or A Boot and a Shoe, the arrangements are concise and the tuneful melodies are expressed with a thoughtful elegance (the Section Quartet add superb string arrangements to several tracks), as the thick electric guitar textures that rumble below the surface add a slightly disquieting element that's different than the clean psych-pop surfaces of Martinis & Bikinis or the acoustic textures of her more recent work (but don't fret, "Little Plastic Life" has a hook as lovely as anything she's ever committed to tape). Some fans will expect Don't Do Anything to be Phillips' "breakup album," and lyrics like "I thought if he understood he wouldn't treat me this way" (from "No Explanations"), "Did you ever love me?" (from "Another Song"), and "I'd rather be alone than with someone who doesn't know" (from "My Career in Chemistry") certainly suggest that the notions of betrayal and broken hearts were in her thoughts. But nearly all the songs on Don't Do Anything work on two levels, as they express misgivings of affairs of the heart as well as the uncertain navigation of the soul, and the finale, "Watching Out of This World," clearly addresses a disappointment far deeper than any heartache. With Don't Do Anything, Sam Phillips has struck out on her own with a work that's among her most challenging to date, and it reveals that she's held on to the gifts that have made her one of the most rewarding singer/songwriters of her generation while adding fresh accents as she follows her muse with commendable courage and clarity.

4 Stars

- allmusicguide

Sam Phillips is a brand fans rely on. Not to sully her work with the grimy language of commerce, but her stellar track record merits kudos. Few career artists of such high standards have fared as well. When David Bowie or Elvis Costello roll out an album, it often feels like the launch of a popular software upgrade; they struggle so hard to reinvent the wheel, you can hear the sweat beading on their brows. But after the hoopla subsides, the flaws get all the attention.

Phillips doesn’t avoid change. She began life as contemporary-Christian recording artist Leslie Phillips. In the late ’80s, a change of heart—and nomenclature—led to a deal with Virgin and four inventive discs that saw her through the next decade. A hiatus to focus on family ended with 2001’s Fan Dance, which also unveiled a more pared-down sound. But, like fellow L.A. veterans Tom Waits and Eleni Mandell, when Phillips charts a new course, she rarely loses direction; even her one misfire—1996’s overproduced, underwritten Omnipop—had merit.

Her latest, Don’t Do Anything, rivals the best of her catalog. But while, musically, these 12 originals slot in neatly alongside the intimate grooves of Fan Dance and 2004’s A Boot And A Shoe, they introduce an important new wrinkle. For the first time since 1987, Phillips went with a producer other than her longtime creative foil (and now ex-husband) T Bone Burnett: Herself.

The difference is subtle yet clearly discernable. This is Sam Phillips unvarnished. Underscoring this shift, opener “No Explanations” kicks off with just her papery voice and low, distorted guitar tones; having circumnavigated the realms of indie rock since her beginnings, hearing such a lo-fidelity incarnation of the artist initially startles. But the approach quickly gels.

On her early records with Burnett, Phillips’ music vibrated with color. The searing pinks and electric blues of her album jackets complemented the songs inside, which sometimes swirled like psychedelic poster prints: The Indian-restaurant disco of “I Can’t Please You” (from Martinis And Bikinis); the paisley pop of her should-have-been-a-hit single “I Don't Know How To Say Goodbye To You” (from The Indescribable Wow). With the switch to Nonesuch in 2001, her world took on burnished hues of copper and honey, replacing baroque flourishes with quieter, acoustic timbres.

Now she progresses further still, concentrating on texture. Mixed so instruments are often heard at curious, uneven levels, Don’t Do Anything sounds humble, homemade. Instead of meticulous chamber pieces, these selections are arranged like shoebox dioramas. It’s about tiny details: The metallic buzzing of strings; percussion generated on what sounds like cardboard boxes full of blankets, or mason-jar maracas. “Another Song” opens with a static-riddled melody from a music box or lost toy; the coda of “Under The Night” dissolves into crackling guitar noise. These touches are as vital to the fabric of the album as its songs and their singer.

Phillips wraps probing lyrics in beguiling melodies. Spiritual themes recur throughout Don’t Do Anything (“Can't Come Down” was inspired by the life of a popular L.A. preacher from the 1930s, and on “Signal” she looks for a sign “Between heart and skin / Through the shoulders where the wings might have been”), but her questioning transcends any specific denomination. On the title cut, she reiterates that her admirations for her beloved run deepest “When you don’t know, when you don’t try / When you don’t say anything.”

Nowhere are her quiet powers of persuasion more evident than on “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us.” Burnett already recorded this number, on the Robert Plant/Allison Krauss collaboration he produced, Raising Sand. Contrasted with that mellifluous reading, Phillips’ version feels like a ceremonial dance ’round a bonfire, the tempo pushing forward oh-so-gradually as strings weave in and out. If she ever decides to ditch her musical career, the singer could probably enjoy success as a charismatic cult leader.

Phillips has proven herself capable of appealing to mass audiences, via her long affiliation with The Gilmore Girls. Heck, she had a song on one of the best-selling albums of 2007. But mainstream popularity has never been her aim. “I’d rather make art than make my dreams come true,” she quoted in the album's promotional materials. On Don’t Do Anything, she succeeds beautifully by doing nothing more than being the best possible version of herself.

- pastemagazine.com

Artist: Sam Phillips
Album: Don't Do Anything
Date Of Release: 2008
Genre: Indie Pop, Alternapop, Singer-Songwriter
Bitrate: VBR --alt-preset extreme

Sam Phillips - Dont Do Anything 2008 - WITH REVIEWS torrent

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