by Ljubinko Zivkovic (@zivljub)
For those a bit more familiar with songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Zach Phillips, you’re sure to know that he belongs in that exciting and always refreshing field you can loosely call left-field pop. In that respect he can be, again loosely, compared to R. Stevie Moore, another prodigy and a man whose cult following is always on the verge of becoming accepted by a wider audience. Yet, there is another comparison that you can make between Phillips and Moore. They both are able to come up with truly exciting releases at a frantic pace. Again, like Moore, Phillips does it as mainly recording at home. While Moore does everything under his name, Phillips does that under his name and with a number of bands like Blanche Blanche Blanche, Fievel Is Glauque and in this case, Perfect Angels.
Phillips is at the same time a man of the world, moving around from his native New Hampshire to London and Brussels, and probably somewhere else too. He is currently mainly working out of Brussels, from where his label la Loi is coming up with some exquisite releases, like this one, Exit from the Ultra-World.
Like in many other instances, Perfect Angels is Phillips on any instrument you can think of together with a lead singer, in this case it is Olia Eichenbaum, as well as a cast of revolving collaborators. For this edition of Perfect Angels, you can count up to six of them. So, what do we get here musically? Some exquisite off-kilter soft pop, with bossa nova as some sort of a base, with Phillips, Eichenbaum and their cohorts going off in every direction, without actually ever-leaving the starting bossa nova premise. It all sounds like some sort of a musical kaleidoscope, where Phillips shuffles the musical pieces and lets them fall as they may, without actually falling out of the (bossa nova) box they are set in.
It all sounds familiar and completely new at the same time. Perfect in its imperfect way, if you will. After all, how do you fit a cover of jazzman Steve Kuhn and Sixties pop icons The Chiffons on the same album and make them sound as they naturally belong together? So, what does it do for you in the end? Actually, it makes you search for every piece of Zach Phillips you can get your hands on.