Untitled Document
Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, possibly the hottest
middle-aged people on the planet, are back with Back Numbers, an album that’s
almost as pretty as they are. Grieving Luna fans can’t be blamed if
the occasion seems bittersweet, however. It’s hard not to wonder
whether the excellence of the new CD is a result of Luna’s demise two
years ago, which left the sexy spouses with a lot more time for their
erstwhile side project. Still, it’s pure masochism not to celebrate
the fact that Back Numbers is a triumph, combining the rainy-day reveries of the
duo’s earlier work with lustrous flashes of Luna’s fretboard
heroics. It isn’t a huge departure from previous efforts, but it does
sound more assured — less a side project and more a real band. Like 2003’s L’Avventura and the recent Words You Used
to Say EP, Back
Numbers was produced by glam-rock legend Tony
Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex), who sensibly refrained from bringing too
much glittery ruckus into the connubial boudoir. Kissed with shivering
vibes and shuddering subharmonics, these ’60s-inspired duets
alternate between the naughty élan of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin and the more down-home
decadence of their American counterparts, Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.
Wareham and Phillips aren’t as smutty as the former pair or as zany
as the latter, but they’re just as charismatic in their way.
Consisting of four rather obscure covers (including a Hazlewood-penned
Ann-Margret vehicle) and seven co-written originals, the album is very much
of a piece, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the
couple’s amazing soundtrack for The
Squid and the Whale. Wareham and Phillips have
an unerring instinct for putting the perfect songs in the perfect context;
they also seem to understand the intrinsic character of their voices
— his bone-dry and reedy, hers dewy and girlish — and how to
play up their strengths rather than compensate for their shortcomings. An ace band is always an asset, of course. Augmenting
Phillips’ sturdy bass and Wareham’s predictably brilliant
guitar are hypnotic synths, courtesy of Sonic Boom (formerly of Spacemen
3); vibes by sometime subway busker Sean McCaul; subtly groovy drums by
Matt Johnson; and double bass and electric 12-string by Visconti. More
impressive than the individual talents of the players, though, is their
collective coherence, their absolute subservience to the songs. From the
spectral opening dirge, “Singer Sing,” to the ebullient anthem
“You Turned My Head Around,” to the string-sweetened psych
canon “Crystal Blue R.I.P.,” everything flows together like a
dream — the kind you might have on a Sunday morning, when
you’re just lucid enough to realize that you’re sleeping in the
arms of someone you love. Led by prizewinning fiction writer Mark Ray Lewis,
Trilobite is a rusty, dusty avant-folk outfit that seems almost as ancient
as its Paleozoic namesake. Based in Albuquerque, N.M. (also home to kindred
spirits the Handsome Family), the band bolsters the frontman’s bleak
erudition with scrappy instrumentation and oodles of eerie atmospherics.
Depression-era pump organs and thrift-store pianos grapple with grumbling
trombones, sobbing violas, and plangent pedal steel while Lewis and
co-vocalist Michelle Collins sing about lonely pumpkin farmers, disgraced
preachers, Burgundian sirens, and medieval soldiers. The goofy waltz
“Let’s Hope for Esperanza,” wherein a horny García
Lorca-quoting teenager moons over his family’s domestic, is a welcome
bright spot, all bad puns and overdone sibilance, but it’s atypical.
More characteristic is the appropriately titled “Samsara,” in
which a bright banjo offsets a barely audible voice-mail message from an
anoymous old lady whose birthday greeting to her estranged grandson is all
the more poignant for being a wrong number.
Contact René Saller at rssaller@core.com.
This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2007.
