Five years after her last disc of all-new material, Sam Phillips has returned with a beguiling album that represents something old and something new for the artist. Phillips’ familiar hushed, husky vocals and her melancholic lyrics are once again finely displayed. Her songs still reveal someone struggling with life’s uncertainties. On the brief “Is That Your Zebra?”, for example, she simply croons the questioning words: “what,” “when,” “who,” “how” and “where.”
What is different, however, is the disc’s sonic feel. For Fan Dance, Phillips and her husband/producer, T Bone Burnett, have stripped her earlier lush, Beatlesque pop sound down to something more spare yet still exotic. You hear it immediately with the opening cut — the alluring title track that’s guided by Marc Ribot’s off-kilter Quattro banjo guitar and Jim Keltner’s Far East-accented percussion work. The revered Van Dyke Parks also provides his elegant musical touches to a couple songs, while the smoldering “Incinerator” is one of several tunes projecting an enticing, torchy vibe.
With its live-in-the-studio sound, this disc’s “less is more” instrumentation doesn’t overwhelm the words. On an earlier album, a song like the marvelous “Five Colors” might have been dressed up in a swirl of studio garnishes, but the simple setting it gets here — with Phillips strumming an acoustic guitar, Carla Azar on traps, and Gillian Welch playing bass and singing harmonies — makes for a more emotionally direct effort.
While the album is brief at under 34 minutes, Phillips never lets her songs overstay their welcome, resulting in her warmest, most inviting record to date.
