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J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle

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Published: Jun 18, 2008

"This is the breaking-up," Sam Phillips sighs near the end of "No Explanations," the wrenching divorce chronicle that opens her latest opus, Don't Do Anything. She's talking about hearts — specifically, hers after the departure of husband T-Bone Burnett — but she could just as easily be talking about sound. Everything in the song is spatially incorrect: The guitars are too high, the vocals are too low, the drum just a grim heartbeat in the background. Sound remains this terrifically ruined for the remainder of the record — scraped, scuffed, screwed-up, off-pitch. Phillips has been honing this particular aesthetic since 2001's Fan Dance, a record that closed the door on her '90s art-pop tendencies in favor of a kind of bleached, ruined folk. Don't Do Anything, the first record Phillips has produced herself, pries even more wood from the foundations. Phillips' intention is clear: If breaking up is hard to do, then perhaps it ought to sound that way.

Sam Phillips Don’t Do Anything (Nonesuch)

Lil Wayne The Carter III (Cash Money/Universal)

Almost as important as the recording has been the hype, so let's just cut to the chase: The Carter III is as good as you've heard, and maybe a little better, a long-coming tonic for anyone watching heartsick as commercial hip-hop steadily plummeted from profundity to idiocy. There are no songs on The Carter III that rely on just the repetition of a refrain. Instead, Wayne dares to put a premium on something old-fashioned and unhip: writing. He exploits the double-meaning of words, stringing together lyrics that mean 26 things at once. In "Mrs. Officer," a jokey soul number about a tryst with a cop, Wayne declares, "She knows I'm raw/ she knows I'm from the street/ and all she wants me to do/ is fuck the police." The record's arguable apex is "Dr. Carter," a song that, in both spirit and structure, recalls Jeru the Damaja's "You Can't Stop the Prophet." In it, Wayne plays doctor to a series of laid-up MCs suffering from fatal illnesses: lack of concepts, no originality, weak flow and no style. Wayne remedies all of their ailments, but the severity and contagiousness of the disease is never in question. If that's enough to make the next Soulja Boy think twice, the battle is already won.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)

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