Consumer Guide Album

The Chills: Soft Bomb [Slash/Reprise, 1992]
As with so many formal coups, one of the pleasures of Submarine Bells was how incorrigibly it challenged unwritten rules (about brightness, concreteness, pretension, keyboards) while adhering to the ones you really can't break (about tunefulness, concision, savvy, guitars). This is just the opposite: adventurous on a surface that accommodates depressive codas and Van Dyke Parks strings, but produced with Martin Phillipps's newly acquired phalanx of L.A. sidemen in mind. Though most garage-pop improves when the beat gets solider, the hooks get clearer, the singer moves up in the mix, and Peter Holsapple adds a guitar, these devices are misconceived for the evanescent Chills. Even when they're all 20 seconds too long, however, Phillipps's tunes stay with you. Reordered to close on "Song for Randy Newman Etc.," a living metaphor for the difficulty of his craft, and to surround the personal songs with the social context Phillipps captures so much more vividly than he thinks he does, this would be a worthy follow-up. I suggest a tape that goes 1-2-3-11-8-6-12-10-13-14-4-9. Skip the fragments, and the long dead metaphor for the shallowness of his craft that implicates a defenseless cab driver. Continue to foreground "Male Monster From the Id," a Greenpeace supporter's bleeding-heart analysis of the sexual power play. A-