Sam Phillips (not to be confused with the Sun Records impresario) is many things: a gifted singer-songwriter, an underrated alt-rock goddess, a composer of incidental television music (all those “la, la la’s” on Gilmore Girls) and a performer with a stage presence that’s both warmly confident and magnificently eerie. In recent years, she has also become a fiercely independent artist, almost an iconoclast of sorts—a quality one can trace back near the start of her career, when she recorded Contemporary Christian music under her birth name, Leslie Phillips. After four well-received albums in that genre, she concluded she no longer wanted to be “a cheerleader for God” (as she bluntly put it in one interview) and switched over to secular pop music (and professionally adopted a childhood family nickname). Whether brought on by an actual crisis of faith, feeling discomfort from that boxed-in community, or by meeting musician T-Bone Burnett (who became both her longtime producer and romantic partner after helming her final Leslie album), her decision to leave one world behind for another continually enhances the cultural, philosophical, and yes, spiritual nature of much of her subsequent catalog.
Transitioning from religious to secular music, her artistry immediately flourished. The Indescribable Wow (1988), her debut as Sam, is a near-perfect ten-track album of sly, sighing retro pop. A little more tart and perhaps a few shades darker, Cruel Inventions (1991) kicks off with the clever confession, “If I told myself I believed in love, and that’s enough / I’d be lying,” and concludes with a gorgeous manifesto against uniformity (“Where The Colors Don’t Go”). Both records are very good, though the former’s production sometimes feels a little dated and the latter is occasionally a touch too internal (it could use a little more sweetening). By contrast, Martinis & Bikinis is an important step forward, not only for Phillips’ growing confidence and agility as both a lyricist and a tunesmith, but also in how effortlessly it balances her affable persona with an ever-cunning acidity (just look at that album cover).
Following “Love and Kisses”, a minute-long apéritif whose lyrics contain the album’s purposely frivolous title, Phillips doles out one catchy, tightly constructed pop song after another. Practically every instrumental and vocal part provides some sort of hook, from the clipped barre chords of “Signposts” and the elastic bass line of “Same Rain” to the declarative opening riffs of both “When I Fall” and “Same Changes” (the latter almost as effective as the one in The Beatles’ “Day Tripper”). And yet, only roughly half of Martinis & Bikinis is strictly guitar pop. As with the Fab Four, Phillips doesn’t shy away from adornments inspired by a spectrum of musical genres. “Baby I Can’t Please You”, for instance, has a Middle Eastern flavored, Van Dyke Parks string arrangement (along with plenty of sitars and tablas), while ecological lament “Black Sky” aims for Tom Waits-style, post-apocalyptic minimalism, with Phillips’ vocal almost entirely carrying the melody over a stark, clanging percussion-heavy backdrop. Both are pop songs that also expand the idea of what such a thing can contain. From: https://hauntedjukebox.com/2015/12/06/sam-phillips-martinis-bikinis/
