The Ben Phillips Band
Freak Like Me
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The problem with this CD is that this guy is simply not a freak. He sounds like a jackass from a small town in the middle of nowhere. The rhymes are too obvious and predictable. So are the chord changes. The production is decent. Whoever mixed it used that super-compression trick with the overdrive to where it sounds like the cymbals are exploding. This is poseur rebellion crap that you’d hear in an over-contrived alternateen movie made by someone’s dad who can’t tell the difference between this and the real thing. His voice is super-pretentious and breathy; the kind of thing that would be overdubbed when a slacker kid on a high school sitcom is playing in his garage band. The production skills seem to fade when it gets to track three, and it becomes too stupid to even listen to anymore. If this was a joke album made by the guys in Ween, I could at least laugh.