It’s all speculation really. An atom of inspiration comes hurtling through our galaxy at nearly a million miles per hour, a microscopic mite rocketing through a solid ice-sheet of apathy and indolence and twenty-seconds later on the lateral side of our brain, the speeding atom explodes and a lightning spread of nerve-activity sees it spin-off into another dimension – and sometimes bearing the germ of an idea, a tune, perhaps. It’s pollination at a cerebral level. One minute you’re heading nowhere – the next you’re grabbing your guitar and scratching around for a notepad. On another level it’s a highway. And where does one arrive? At the troubled essence of rock n roll. If you’re lucky. And Grant Lee Phillips is nothing if not lucky. Not only is the former roof-tarrer a seasoned composer for film and television, a magician, a poet he also has a gift for any instrument within his reach: guitar, bass, organ, ukulele, piano. And for what spaces there are still remaining, he’s able to rope in the likes of REM’s Peter Buck and Bill Rieflin to fill them. So whilst we may attribute his creativity to divine intervention, unruly cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, accident and serendipity – it’s also in the tools he uses to manage it: a voice as smooth and as dry as freeze-dried coffee, the fiery crack of a lyrical whip, the purr of a six-string, a deep, recursive melancholy and the healing hands of redemption. Whereas Phillip’s nineteeneighties album – an album of covers – paid direct and distinct lip-service to a fairly staggering range of influences, Strangelet comes mashed from a complex of malts that have been left to mature in sherry oak casks for the last twenty years. So you can well imagine its strength. Catharsis, the slightly irrational, the prevalence of dark matter, the unpredictable, the hardcore, conflict, conciliation and reconciliation – it’s all here – and so too are the influences; the influences of science, of life on the road, the cruel stab of reality, a little bit of Lennon, a smidgen of T.Rex, a sprinkling of Pixies, a shake or two of peppery Americana, some Sonic Youth, a spoonful of The Cure – all greased down with a short, sharp slippery dose of early rock n rock. A complex brew, but remarkably clean and simple on the pallet; all come racing across time and space like the dense and volatile mix of ‘strangelets’ described by quark-related science and likely to consume you whole. It’s a marvellous album. ‘Fountain Of Youth’ is as tender as the sigh on the lips of young love, ‘Raise The Spirit’ as sexy as the purr of a Harley-Davidson, and ‘Johnny Guitar’ as feelgood as the scream of a board on the waves.
His most robust and complete solo album to date. It’s a corker – whichever dimension you are in.