CD Reviews

Phil Stacey

Lyric Street

By MIKAEL WOOD | May 6, 2008

1.0 Stars

Around my house, we referred to this Season 6 American Idol loser as Nosferatu, a nickname that the dude’s outré bald-vampire steez guarantees we weren’t alone in using. No coincidence that Phil Stacey was interesting on Idol only when he sang songs that emphasized his creepiness — “Every Breath You Take,” for instance, or LeAnn Rimes’s “I Need You.” Unfortunately, on his homonymous debut, he seems intent on proving that, hey, he’s just a regular guy with regular-guy concerns. “You can walk on water/You can walk on the moon,” he sings over good-time guitars in the opener, “When the walkin’ is over at the end of the road/It ain’t what you’ve done, son, it’s who you know.” Gee, who knew Hollywood was such a tough town? The result is one of the Idol franchise’s dullest outings yet, a scared-straight pop-country bore that shares more with Taylor Hicks’s vanilla-bean white-soul bomb than with Bucky Covington’s bat-shit Southern-rock disc. Come back, Kellie Pickler, all is forgiven!

Related: Soul brothers, Portland scene report, April 14, 2006, Jay Reatard | Watch Me Fall, More

Topics: CD Reviews , Kellie Pickler, LeAnn Rimes, Taylor Hicks

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