PRIVATE PARTS & PIECES

On "Private Parts & Pieces", ANTHONY PHILLIPS stakes his claim as a regressive (versus progressive) artist, returning to the days when the sweet, wan trails of madrigals stirred in the countryside air. His first two albums were, in retrospect, ambitious attempts to live up to his legacy as the original guitarist from GENESIS. Here, PHILLIPS retreats from the workaday world and emerges with music that better reflects his peculiar tastes and talents. At the time, the idea of recording uncluttered instrumentals for acoustic guitar and piano hardly seemed sustainable across an album, let alone a long series of them. And yet "Private Parts & Pieces" proved to be oddly appealing, in a sense paving the way for new age artists like GEORGE WINSTON and MICHAEL HEDGES. "The Geese & The Ghost" did use the same antiquated guitar passages, but PP&P is far more transparent in sound, a simpler tapestry than the exotic, action-packed adventures portrayed in his first release. Where the first album followed a specific story, these ten songs are a series of unrelated scenes that, from a distance, form a single picture of pastoral beauty. GENESIS fans will find echoes of "Trespass" in this collection, from "Field of Eternity" (which claims to recycle parts of an unrecorded GENESIS song) to "Flamingo." Of course, selling this album on the merits of GENESIS is antithetical to its intent; PHILLIPS was sharing his own private muse with the world, winning more than a few converts in the process. He'll never be ready for prime time, as the closing "Seven Long Years" makes painfully clear, but those who have peeked into his musical world wanting no more than a glimpse have sometimes stood enrapt for hours.