Far more interesting than its two predecessors (Contribution and Second Contribution), Shawn Phillips' Collaboration makes an ambitious bid for the Heaviest Hollywood Saturday Night Trip Award, steeped as it is with engineering gimmickry and the enthusiasm of the collaborators (Paul Buck-master and Peter Robinson) to "try anything." And in this instance anything is a much greater commitment to imaginative musical experimentation than Phillips has previously shown.

A bravura talent afflicted with cocksure narcissism, Phillips, like Elton John, has always been too much of a good thing. He has been allowed to pour forth torrents of words, often resulting in verbal overload. Such torrents entail a sacrifice of melodic line, for which fancy studio productions cannot wholly compensate. This sacrifice (or lack of gift) is a major reason why Elton John's records are hits and Shawn Phillips' are not.

Phillips' tunes exist mainly to carry the poetic baggage. His lyrics, while they contain many potent images and express the loftiest sentiments, too often turn out to be a meandering series of grandiose "high consciousness" truisms strung together with forced rhymes ("the lives of a farmer, the lives of a doctor/should be running parallel/shrewd politicians meet wealthy morticians/do they really burn in hell"). Forced rhyming was characteristic of many of Dylan's lyrics during his early surrealist period, except that in Dylan's case there were more good rhymes than bad and, good, bad or indifferent, his lyrics were fueled by explosive vision and vengeance; finally, if nothing else did, Dylan's voice was able to persuade us momentarily of their inevitable rightness.

Phillips is also a visionary, but his voice is too mellow and his delivery too pretentious to get to the marrow; he is Johnny Mathis with balls. Moreover, what verbal rhetoric his voice might convey is somewhat blunted by the spacious, filtered sound of the electronic mix, which is so heavily echoed that it creates an almost unbridgeable aesthetic distance.

Despite these flaws, Collaboration almost succeeds on its nerve–its brash, peripatetic originality. It opens with "Us We Are," an invocatory splash in the spirit of Hair, and goes on to incorporate a stupifying variety of references–everything from 2001 and Moody Blues to Lee Michaels and Blood Sweat and Tears to flamenco and Beethoven, you name it; there is even a fascinating segment of almost atonal jazz at the end of "Armed," a cut that succeeds by virtue of its unexpected changes.

The most interesting other cuts are "For Her," a succinct narrative about a past (and present) love; "The Only Logical Conclusion or Get Up Off Your Ass and Dance," an exciting electronically-hyped discotheque instrumental featuring some fine jazzy organ work by Peter Robinson; and "Springwind," the 9 1/2-minute concluding cut in which all stops are pulled to display the ultimate Hollywood sound package of inspirational phantasmagoria.

It is the musical transformations and juxtapositions, most in evidence in "Armed," that are finally the strongest points of Collaboration. One is caught by surprise as music gives way to or is joined by sound effect, so that the linear momentum of the record as a whole is carried forward more by engineering virtuosity than by thematic conception. It is a sophisticated application of The Trip Formula, wherein one song more or less blends into another in a dramatically fluid sound montage and is the most interesting thing on the album. (RS 108)

STEPHEN HOLDEN