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TOO comfortABLE?
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Grant Lee Phillips may have had an air of innocence about him when he first hit the charts with Grant Lee Buffalo back in 1993 with the title track from the trio’s 1993 debut, Fuzzy (Slash/Elektra), but he’d already cut his teeth in the more art-damaged outfit Shiva Burlesque. So in 2004, he comes to the stage a seasoned performer — a songwriter with a deep well of material to draw on, both as a bandleader and as a solo artist. And though he did seem to drift in late ‘90s, directly after Grant Lee Buffalo called it quits, he held on to a loyal following large enough to have packed the downstairs room at the Middle East when he came through by himself four or five years ago, with just his guitar and a piano for back-up. It didn’t hurt that the shy, reserved persona he’d cultivated in Grant Lee Buffalo had been cast aside in favor of a more jocular, talkative, and easygoing entertainer who made light of his piano songs by admitting he was starting to feel like Elton John. In fact, one of the things that made Grant Lee Buffalo’s debut album so appealing (the hits from that disc are included on the new Rhino retrospective Storm Hymnal, and both of Shiva Burlesque’s albums are also now back in print) was the subtle yet unmistakable Bowie-esque inflection that graced Grant’s delivery on songs that were otherwise steeped in Americana. It’s what kept the band from the alterna-country bins early on. That and the novelty of Phillips’s overdriven acoustic guitar, which gave the trio a sound apart from neo-roots traditionalists. Given his proven ability to draw in Boston, and the large quantity of his music that’s hit stores recently (his new Zoë/Rounder solo album Virginia Creeper as well as the Rhino anthology and the two Shiva Burlesque discs), it’s not surprising that Phillips packed T.T. the Bear’s Place a week ago Tuesday. Unfortunately, unless you were willing to push your way up front, that made it hard to appreciate the full impact of his low-key set, which featured backing by an upright-bassist, a drummer, and a female vocalist. Of late, he’s been embracing acoustic-guitar-based alterna-country as his dominant approach (Virginia Creeper is laced with fiddles, slide guitar, and other tell-tale touches of Americana). And though he started his set a little after 10, leaving himself more than two hours to fill, he focused on the quieter material from his two Zoë/Rounder releases, only rarely stepping on his distortion pedal. The good news is that his rapt audience seemed familiar with the material on both CDs. But it was telling that the biggest response he got was for "Drunken Angel," a song by alterna-country queen Lucinda Williams. Not only did it energize the audience, it brought out an edge in Phillips’s voice that was missing for most of the set. It’s clear that he’s settling comfortably into the alterna-country niche; at T.T.’s, though, he sounded as if he might be feeling a little too comfortable.
BY MATT ASHARE
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