In ”One More Night,” Mr. Collins’s recent number-one hit, a ticking snare drum injects a whisper of lurking fear into a song that suggests a sweeter, tenderer reprise of ”Against All Odds.” And in the impassioned ”Don’t Lose My Number,” the singer offers solace to a criminal suspect- turned-fugitive. Like many of Mr. Collins’s songs, ”Don’t Lose My Number” is defiantly vague, sketching the outlines of a melodrama but withholding the full story. The album’s final song,”Take Me Home,” is another interior monologue, in which the protagonist may or may not be a discharged mental patient. ”I’ve been a prisoner all my life,” he sings. ”They can turn off my feeling like they’re turning off my light, but I don’t mind.” The singer wants only to be taken home ”because I don’t remember.”
Mr. Collins’s astringent voice, with its petulant undertones and grim, wound-up edge is as important as the drums in sustaining a mood of dramatic suspense. And by double-tracking and electronically phasing the vocals, Mr. Collins and his producer Hugh Padgham, accentuate the sense in his singing of ominous psychological submergence.
On the surface, ”No Jacket Required,” is an album bursting with soulful hooks and bright peppy tunes. But beneath its shiny exterior, Mr. Collins’s drums and his voice carry on a disjunctive, enigmatic dialogue between heart and mind, obsession and repression. The jacket that the album title assures us is not required may not be a tuxedo but a straitjacket.
PHIL COLLINS: POP MUSIC’S ANSWER TO ALFRED HITCHCOCK
Review of No Jacket Required by Stephen Holden