Indescribable Wow

Sam Phillips's first album of her post-contemporary Christian period is evocative, hooky big-beat folk-rock. With husband-to-be T-Bone Burnett contributing one of his most nuanced productions, The Indescribable Wow is full of varied settings for Phillips's love songs (the Shirelles-style Latin lilt of "Out of Time") and spiritual doubts (the raga-rockish "Holding On to the Earth"). She went on to make entertaining, artier discs, but this is her most purely enjoyable. --Rickey Wright