Smokey, smart, sultry, brainy and saturday in a bath in full clothed, Sam Phillips adds producing to her many-feathered bow for her eighth album (or her 13th, if you factor in her 1980s Christian-accented incarnation as Leslie Phillips).
Aiming for ''something lighter'', Don't Do Anything is packed to the gills with topsy-turvy lyrics that purport to say something but ar intended to mean something altogether different. Cleverly, Philips shrouds everything in an almost palpably incorporeal air (yes, that's how higgledy-piggledy it genuinely is!) conjured out of distorted, twanging guitars, thud to the point of booming percussion, viscous piano lines and breathy, crushed, vulnerable vocals that ringway your ears and inject themselves straight into your bloodstream. The result is an album to catch deliriously lost within.
The championship track is a reverend exercise in playful sophistication, delivered with a attractively understated light of pertain that is deliciously corroborated by the melodious merely coruscating judgment of conviction of Little Plastic Life and the pulsing, pouting early Elvis Costello-like scream of My Career In Chemistry. The fevervish, scrunched-up guitar, brittle banjo and stuttering staccato percussion on Shake it Down offers a mordant, clattering Tom Waits backdrop to perchance the cleanest, most aim vocals on the album.
Austerely covered by Robert Plant and Allison Krauss on last year's Raising Sand collaboration, Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us, in its creator's manpower, comes across more appropriately as a quixotic genus Circus sideshow oddment.
Another Song is a perfect Phillips concoction � any number of styles (and a myriad number of emotions) corralled together in one compact, bleakly beautiful toy � and Watching Out Of This World, with its splashy guitar heartbeat and lightly evaporating vocals provides a vivid punctuation mark to bring an album full of intrigue and dark-hued beauty to a memorable close.
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