Mobilize

Any first time visitor to America in the early ’90s might have found it hard to keep Grant Lee Buffalo’s Fuzzy album out of their heads on that virgin trip down the pike. Almost a decade later, ‘See America’, the first track on G-L Phillips first solo album proper, is still echoing Simon & Garfunkel’s hymn to Uncle Sam.

Unfortunately, it’s only an echo. There’s something grandiose and overblown about Grant-Lee Phillips’ phrasing that pre-empts any real possibilities of humour, or irony, or even wanton badness for the sake of it.

His melodies do the job, and this new record utilises a peculiar but pleasing palate of muted drum figures, manipulated guitar and synth strings, but as I say, the vocal tone grates. When he delivers a line like “Face the night in all its fireworks/Wrap yourself up in the silence”, he sounds a little too chuffed with his own lyricism.

It’s a difference that makes all the difference – that between Elvis’ Blood & Chocolate and The Juliet Letters, or Mike Scott’s Bring ’Em All In and Still Burning.

There are of course a few fine moments. The title tune has snatches of banjo and mellotron that evoke the lonesomeness of the urban as much as the pastoral. In fact, it’s the best thing on the album, all queasy theremin and Bad Seeds backing vocals, notwithstanding the fussy Dr Rhythm figure.

But ultimately, I fear what we have here are irreconcilable differences between record and reviewer.