Tracks
Phosphorescent: "I Am A Full Grown Man (I Will Lay In The Grass All Day)"
(2005)
By Dom Sinacola | 11 January 2008
Like the branch-hollow yesteryear of your favorite Califone song, Phosphorescent’s schizophrenic Americana is ramped on kitchen percussion and rough electric guitars. So, an unexpected tension is grafted between the scored shuffle of a squelching lick and the sharp, solid pot and pan bramble. Tangled, Georgian Matthew Houck wails like Connor Oberst plus the machismo Oberst lacks, adding little melody but filling a spot ineffably central to the song. Then the caboodle is vivisected by a broken fence of horns, alternately twangy and portentous.
Bare and sloppy at first, “I Am A Full Grown Man” swells into grandiosity with stomp drums and a thick yarn of throats to back the Devil’s Dixieland. Plainly: the song sounds epic when it shouldn’t be; it’s more alt- than country; the vocals are strangled and the lyrics weak, but both sound sweet; the contradiction in the title makes more sense than Houck maybe intended. As second releases go, Phosphorescent is definitely on to something.
Bare and sloppy at first, “I Am A Full Grown Man” swells into grandiosity with stomp drums and a thick yarn of throats to back the Devil’s Dixieland. Plainly: the song sounds epic when it shouldn’t be; it’s more alt- than country; the vocals are strangled and the lyrics weak, but both sound sweet; the contradiction in the title makes more sense than Houck maybe intended. As second releases go, Phosphorescent is definitely on to something.