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He looks like a substitute algebra teacher. He's spent most of his life bald and bitter. He dared conjure the demonic banshee that is Sussudio. And, perhaps worst of all, his first album in eight years is a dull, unnecessary rehash of Motown classics.
But you know what?
I still love Phil Collins.
Maybe that's not the coolest stance for a music critic to take, but too bad. I loved the Londoner in Genesis; I loved him out of Genesis. I dig that his pleading voice sounds like it's just huffed a puff of helium. Perhaps you think his continent-crossing Concorde antics during 1985's Live Aid were arrogant showboating; I think hitting Wembley and JFK in the same day was an earnest attempt to entertain 'em all.
Collins, now 59, isn't a classic singer by any stretch. But he is a distinctive singer, almost outsider art, an unlikely voice drawing us in. At his best, he's also incredibly, almost painfully, honest, especially on his first three solo albums, juiced by the disintegration of his first marriage: Face Value (1981), Hello, I Must Be Going (1982), No Jacket Required (1985) all made by a man painfully out of love with the idea of love.
When the topic was unrequited or strangled affection, the man could conjure a maelstrom of angst. Against All Odds is a clenched-fist, throat-scraping masterpiece. The drowning-man theories behind In the Air Tonight are fantastic campfire fare, but the truth is that the epic is a devastating portrait of a union gone sour — and Phil hits those famous drums hard for a reason. And I Don't Care Anymore, with its anxious beat, is the ultimate Collins shutdown.
He pretty much phoned it in, as a solo act and in Genesis, after the mid '80s. He had a few nice moments working for the Mouse House (I have a soft daddy spot for Tarzan's You'll Be in My Heart). But for the most part, he settled for thin social commentary (1989's Another Day in Paradise) and lukewarm affirmations (1996's Dance Into the Light).
His new album, the 18-track Motown salute Going Back, to be released Sept. 28, has that musty, wholly lazy stink of Rod Stewart's Great American Songbook records, which, to be fair, are huge moneymakers. I'm happy to have Phil back again — but why this?
The truly odd thing is that Collins has gone out of his way to make such Holland–Dozier–Holland classics as (Love Is Like a) Heatwave and Standing in the Shadows of Love sound exactly like they did in the mid '60s. To which I ask again: What's the point here? The only real difference is Collins' voice, which often sounds like it's been digitally altered to make up for age and time. That creepy thinness is gone; he now sounds marble-mouthed, gargly. If there's a high point, it's the relatively piano-spare Stevie Wonder ballad Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer, which he infuses with some of that old gravitas.
Collins gave an interview where he grumpily anticipated music critics disliking his R&B covers album. Well, his instincts were correct. But, alas, this critic would love Collins to take that anger and turn it into one more bleak, dark, lonely stab at a world gone wrong. When he's at his surliest, he isn't just a torch singer; he burns the whole dang thing to the ground.
Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8467. His Pop Life blog is at tampabay.com/blogs/poplife.
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