One of the surest curses in music is to call someone a "singer-songwriter": the phrase evokes queasy-making memories of that guy in Animal House whose guitar got shattered by John Belushi. Besides which, the label's about as descriptive as "stand-up comedian": so the bozo's standing up - who cares? Lots of people sing and write songs; the smarter ones at least pretend to be a band (à la Trent Reznor) to avoid the accursed singer-songwriter stigma. Of course, the teetotalling blandness and smug earnestness attached to this label are often merited by the vast majority of musicians so called: their music makes the musical stylings of Beavis & Butt-head's Mr. Van Driesen (how could you forget "Men Have Feelings Too"?) seem like the kind of stuff to earn the wrath of the PMRC and its ilk. So Sam Phillips has a problem, right off the bat: she sings, she writes songs, and that's her name on the cover, not a band's - plus, she's got the kind of country/folk/Christian music (!) pedigree just asking for the s/s label. So much for labels. What we have here is a disc whose lyrics are witty, intelligent, sexy, and evocatively oblique without being pretentious or preciously obscure. The music combines killer pop choruses with a smorgasbord of musical arrangements ranging from Beatlesque Rickenbacker guitar parts, Esquivelian lounge-pop horns and percussion, murky jazz brass charts, and dry, avant-retro effects from the Mitchell Froom House of Rummage-Sale Keyboarding. (Froom doesn't produce here, but T-Bone Burnett achieves a similar sort of natural yet utterly non-naturalistic sound.) Cognoscenti will get a fairly good idea of the album's sound by noting that Jon Brion (Aimee Mann, The Grays), Patrick Warren (Michael Penn), Marc Ribot (nearly everyone), and Jim Keltner (everyone else) are featured players. The disc opens with the winner of the Title Most Likely to Be Misspelled competition, "Entertainmen," all murk and slouch; picks up bop speed with "Plastic Is Forever" (containing the immortal line "pain is pleasure when it's televised" - as well as a great rhythm bass clarinet part - !?!), crashes headlong into a Fellini film with the waltz-time "Animals on Wheels," and improbably bursts out of a cake, white go-go booted and miniskirted, shaken not stirred martini in hand, in "Zero Zero Zero!" That "Perfect World" is not a huge hit single proves its chorus's contention that "our ideas of perfect are so imperfect." And how can you not love a CD with a song called "Faster Pussycat to the Library!"? You shouldn't not love it, that's how. So go ahead and call Sam Phillips a singer-songwriter. And then giggle as the pathetic minds of Dan Fogelberg fans are tricked into buying it and instantly pulverized.

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