Featuring such daring instumentation as dobro and accordion alternating with fuzz-tone guitar, incorporating both prayer and social commentary ("Lady Godiva and Me", "Rock of Ages") and history ("Last Days of Tecumseh", "Lone Star Song"), Mighty Joe Moon is crammed with all the daunting elements of an epic. And amazingly, it works.
On this, only his second album (the follow-up to the critically acclaimed Fuzzy, from 1993), chief Buffalo Grant Lee Phillips joins the exalted company of Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, Bob Dylan and John Fogerty in imagining a dream America, constructed partly of our fabled past, partly of possibility. And yet there's no strain to his music; Phillips' voice is clean and almost casual, and his melodies invite. "demon Called Deception, "Mockingbirds", "Honey Don't Think" - these are songs that like all destined classics sound vaguely like you've heard them before. But only in the depths of dreaming. By Paul Evans