Pop Music Review : Sam Phillips Works Her Will at the Roxy

Since reinventing herself from gospel singer to heady mainstream thrush in the late ‘80s, Sam Phillips has developed one of the oddest performing personas in pop--basically, the rock singer as stationary object. She would literally stare down the audience from a fixed spot, offering a sort of sober, sultry, confrontational cabaret in place of pop’s mandatory exuberance.

Her striking minimalism was much the same Thursday at the Roxy, where she performed her first local headlining gig in many years. For the first time, though, she had a keyboard-free band behind her, ready, willing and able to play rock ‘n’ roll--as suggested by the slightly harder tone of her current “Martinis and Bikinis”--instead of going for the baroque.

The counterpoint incorporated both in-your-face class and go-cat-go punch, with Phillips seeming less off-puttingly theatrical and more natural backed by the Holly-to-Harrison guitars of T Bone Burnett and X’s Tony Gilkyson, the richly melodic bass of vet Jerry Scheff and the deal-clinching drums of young, agreeably overenthusiastic Josh LaBelle.

Phillips ironically uses her physical conservatism to sing about abandon. She dedicated “Circle of Fire” to Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell, “who I think just announced their engagement,” and the too-short set focused on her virulently pro-”love”/anti-”moralism” protest songs, which are at once bitterly anti-religion yet sexily religious. Her personal and political metaphor-mixing is some of pop’s most provocative writing right now, and she’s found a live context to do her theoretics justice.