Arctic Reviews

Even the name Phil Lewis sounds like it belongs etched on a business card you find pressed into your unwilling hand by some pinstriped gecko. I mean, he's probably a nice guy, two cats, rattles a tin for charity now and then. Squash on a Saturday morning. But you just know that somebody lacking the imagination to change his stage moniker from Phil Lewis is destined for the opposite of fame and fortune. The dude who holds Satan's coat whilst he throws down fire and brimstone upon the planet. The designated driver whilst the stiff kitten of rock and roll sits in the passenger seat, choking on his own vomit and ruining the upholstery. Shit, if he was the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, he'd be DAMP, Lord of mould and unforgiving bringer of the sniffly cough.

All this would be just nasty - and rather pointless - abuse were it not for the fact that a Phil Lewis has created Movements In Space, a body of work that is almost dumbstruck by it's own irrelevance. Starting with the positives, it's competently played. That'll be all for the positives. Criticisms? Well, lyrics which scan like they were surreptitiously composed on a Blackberry during a boring meeting don't help. Neither does a "Gift" for songwriting which precludes the ability to charachterise and a voice completely devoid of emotion. The result sounds like the background music Sky rejected for their EPG, and when on Burn Burn Burn the Welshman attempts to shift the mood away from the creative straitjacket of cod-arena rock, the results are horrible/hilarious pastiche of Gary Numan. Maybe it's intentional.

In Lewis' defence, the ocean of naivety that Movements In Space floats in prevents it from coming to any real harm. Above all, it's simply impossible to believe that anybody would deliberately set out to create a record as jaw droppingly banal. Worse have been made by people you've heard of who should know better - Scott Weiland's last solo outing Happy In Galoshes springs to mind in this category - but this pointless re-release of the anonymous Lewis' 2007 debut should've stayed buried in the complete obscurity to which it belongs.