GRANT-LEE PHILLIPS - Nineteeneighties (Cooking Vinyl)
A decade or so ago, Phillips achieved middling fame as the frontman of Los Angeles trio Grant Lee Buffalo, who released four country -rock records of variable listen ability before calling it a day in 1999.
His fourth solo release consists of 11 cover versions of songs originally released during the decade of the title.
The source material is what you’d expect - Nick Cave, New Order, the Smiths et al - but this is anything but a straightforward re-recording of Phillips’s fave raves: he moulds the Pixies’ Wave of Mutilation into a gentle country twang, and reworks Joy Division’s The Eternal as a brooding slice of gothic Americana.
