Phil is kind of a strange name for a country singer, not really on the same
continuum with Lyle and Waylon and Hank, suggesting instead a little more
eccentricity and urban irony than your typical red-state crooner. And, in
fact, these nine songs from Akron/Family colleague Phil Weinrobe occupy
country space mostly as a jumping-off point. These soft, low-key country
tunes erupt into experimental chaos; stringed instruments swing from rich,
vibrato tones to crazily vertiginous slides and squeaks, and lyrics wander
absent-mindedly away from well-established themes into odd back alleys and
metaphors. "Sucker" for instance, starts the album in world-weary style, a
strummed acoustic, a twanging pedal steel, underlying Weinrobe's gently
breathed lyrics. Yet mid-track, there's a crazed string breakdown, all
squeak and spiraling drone as fingers slide up and down the high strings
in chaotic frenzy. It's a sound that instantly breaks the songs in half,
not just here but in the otherwise traditional "Backdoor." These breaks
don't alter the fact that Phil's songs are deeply felt, achingly simple,
lovingly polished country tracks, but they add an intriguing discord to the
package... everything after you hear them seems a little weirder, a little
less constrained by form than what came before them.
All four members of Akron/Family make appearances on this skewed country
album, with guitarist/singer Ryan Vanderhoof co-producing the CD and
co-writing the string-embellished, glockenspiel-accented "Bourbon Love,"
Dana Janssen playing drums and Seth Olinsky contributing the wild
guitar breakdown in the middle of "Joke's on Me." Yet, despite
similarities — the willingness to intercut traditional songwriting with
unusual sounds, the warm harmonies — Whatever Happened to Your Loving
Heart is a whole different experience from either Akron/Family album.
The music's center is in Phil's singing and lyrics, subtly enhanced but
never secondary to instrumental accompaniment. He has a wonderfully warm,
frayed and tattered voice, crinkled like old jeans, worn soft in spots with
disappointment and weariness, but instantly comfortable and familiar. The
lyrics, too, are direct, simple and endearingly eccentric, shot through
with longing and regret. The verse to "Backdoor" evokes the singer's
emptiness when his ex returns, the closed-off-ness of small towns and the
unacknowledged loneliness that so many people feel but can't express in
elemental one- and two-syllable words. For example, "If you come
around/ Back to this old ghost town/ With 10,000 things on your mind/ Take off
your boots/ Leave them in the hall/ Some things are better left behind/ And
the back door's for leaving so nobody knows/ The front door's for making
ordinary life into a show."
Around Phil's voice, a web of traditional country sounds is spun, with
melancholy pedal steel and nostalgic bursts of strings. There are stately
acoustic-guitar-strummed rhythms and straight-up snare-beated drums, and
ethereally pretty harmonies. There's a giant, barroom chorus at the end of
"The Happy Song" that might remind you of Akron/Family's "Awake." And
then, every so often, there's something weirder, something that doesn't
quite fit into the Neil Young-to-Byrds continuum, that hints at forms
broken and clichés turned inside out — and that is, finally, what makes
this album so interesting.
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