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Album Review
by SashaS
29-3-2002
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More on: Grant-Lee Phillips
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| GLP's 'Mobilize' |
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Grant-Lee Phillips: 'Mobilize'
(Cooking Vinyl)
Grant-Lee Phillips’s disc is crackers about a lifetime in progress
“Disillusioned with monster label antics and the impending pressure to fit in, Phillips opted to record and release an all acoustic album entitled ‘Ladies Love Oracle’ on his own Magnetic Field Recordings label, to be sold through his website and other internet outlets. This back-to-basics approach was well received by fans and critics alike, who had both become increasingly aware of an era that was beginning to threaten the survival of so many cutting edge artists like Phillips as the corporate climate grew more conservative,” is the passage from Grant Lee Phillips’s biography. When you see something like this, one’s hope for music as an artform is re-enlisted.
In particular when backed by great songs as found on his new album ‘Mobilize’. This disc is a chronicle of the journey so far, a document of the exploration completed. The shift is now onto the internal plane of the experienced, an interior vista of the externally stimulated. The leader of Grant Lee Buffalo hasn’t abandoned the past but enriched it with so many different elements to have overwhelmed it.
‘Mobilize’ refers to motivation rather than barricades, it is a self-examination amidst the changing world, realisation that there is only a finite number of days to attempt to find out the answer to the ultimate question – what is life’s meaning? From the opening ‘See America’ we are invited to look through the industrial might, media imagery and Hollywood propaganda, his native country’s war-mongering ways and domestic ‘racial harmony’… What we see are flawed humans, like every other place on the planet, trying to make sense of it all but only managing another cock-up, as every previous generation.
The inner-focus might have hampered the aural pictures but potholes are avoided by variety of genres housing these sentiments. There is guitar driven ‘Love’s A Mystery’, the sophisticated-cum-classic rocking of ‘Sadness Soot’, ‘Lazily Drowning’ shuffles one with its hypnotic spiel that is seriously addictive, ‘Like A Lover’ is minimalistic, the title-track is maximalistic, ‘Beautiful Dreamers’ is swooningly engaging.
‘We All Get A Taste’ is about a garden news correspondent who, after signing off, throws “his crap back in the van…”, a gesture of a man who’s had too much of life’s dirt… well, okay – a s**tful of lifetime. GLP is far from it, he is at the new beginning… Hail!
8/10
Gig date:
Grant-Lee Phillips plays Shepherds Bush Empire, London, on 13 April 2002
SashaS
29-3-2002
Grant-Lee Phillips’s album ‘Mobilize’ is released 01 April on Cooking Vinyl
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