I wouldn’t be the first and probably not the last to say the music industry is totally out of touch, but that this particular Friday falls shortly before most people’s monthly payday, means that many bank accounts are currently running on fumes. Which calls into question the scheduling of a whole slew today of blockbuster albums. I’ve counted at least ten, including the likes of Adele’s unimaginatively-titled 30 (for which vinyl pressing resources have reportedly been consumed, allegedly causing production problems for everyone else).
I’ll spare you any further consideration of the Adele album - you’ll be hearing enough of it until she releases 35 or 40, or whatever will be her next maudlin confessional - and instead cock a learned ear to the new offerings from Elbow, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Sting, simply because they’re the three of today’s release tsunami that actually interest me.
Elbow - Flying Dream 1
As regulars to this blog will hopefully recall, barely two months ago Elbow dished up an evening of sublime comfort food listening with what was, for many of us at the Hammersmith Apollo, the first gig in almost two years thanks to the pandemic. It was, in any case, the perfect return to gigging, delivered by one of the UK’s finest live acts, anchored by their avuncular lead singer and a set of trademark “soaring” singalong anthems that have brightened many an outdoor summer festival. The set included a cameo from this new album in the delightful What I Am Without You. It gave a glimpse of the somewhat album’s somewhat warmer direction than 2019’s Giants Of All Sizes (and a song vaguely reminiscent of Clive Dunn’s Grandad…) Dream 1 completes this evolution with what can only be described as an absolutely gorgeous album, a cosy, comforting duvet in a winter’s morning that comprehensively taps into Elbow’s undoubted craft for tenderness, both musically and, inevitably, in Guy Garvey as principle lyricist.
Garvey is a core part of Elbow’s “value proposition”, to use an excruciatingly wanky marketing phrase. His immensely likeable persona pours forth from his words and those mellifluous Bury tones that adorn his delivery on radio and TV outings. But it would be wholly wrong to depict Elbow - and Garvey’s presence - as a schmaltz act. They’ve just come up with a formula that allows for melodicism, romantic escape and, yes, even a prog rock sensibility. Flying Dream 1 has the not original precept of being a lockdown album (as, it would appear, are most examples of the current slew), but comes from a performance premise, having been recorded live at Brighton’s Theatre Royal while it was shut to audiences during the pandemic. Of course, all recordings are “live”, but here is an old-fashioned approach, harking back to the days before endless overdubs and, latterly, the digital recording of entire albums on iPhones. Bruce Springsteen’s recent Letter To You was thusly done, and it gives an immediacy without any excess ambience due to the venue. Perhaps, though, it’s what makes Flying Dream 1 sound tight and efficient, genuine even, painting beautiful landscapes about love (The Only Road), hope (After The Eclipse), childhood (Calm And Happy) and the tenderness of the title track. Inveterate romantics might be, as I write, beating a path to their local record emporium/streaming site to wallow in Adele’s latest collection of mawkishness, but as I become ever more reflective myself and, just a little soppy as I prepare for marriage, I know which album I’d rather be immersing myself in. And Flying Dream 1 is its name.
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise The Roof
Like Peter Gabriel, it’s still impossible - annoyingly, perhaps - to separate Robert Plant from the band he fronted many years ago, despite both putting considerable distance between the outfits they once fronted more than 40 years ago. It shouldn’t be necessary, in both cases, considering the bodies of work they’ve generated in the decades since. In Gabriel’s case, singer and group parted company, albeit amicably, and in Plant’s, the entire enterprise ground to an abrupt halt in the wake of its drummer’s misadventure-fuelled death in 1980. But with an uptick in Led Zeppelin activity, as their seminal fourth album recently reached its 50th anniversary, with the obligatory box set reminding everyone of rock’s most archetypal viking marauders, it’s hard not to be drawn on Plant’s legacy as the honey-tressed stage god.
If, though, I could be afforded further licence to compare Gabriel and Plant, their post-band careers have followed similar paths, with both finding their groove in music drawn from a more eclectic palette of cultures than the pop, blues, soul and rock that fuelled their youthful ambition. Plant, in particular, has tapped authentically, post-Zepp, into Americana, reaching a particularly credible, Grammy-hoovering high in 2007 with Raising Sand, his first collaboration with bluegrass singer Alison Krauss. Working with roots authenticity’s go-to producer T Bone Burnett, Raising Sand shifted in impressive quantities, demonstrating an audience acceptance of a music form that Plant has approached passionately and with credibility as a solo artist, digging deep into a version of the blues that his Earth-conquering old vehicle at their core. The formula is reapplied by Plant and Krauss on their follow-up, 14 years later. With Burnett once again overseeing things, Raise The Roof continues where its predecessor left off with a delightful stroll through covers of bluegrass, rockabilly and folk, each balanced by Plant’s gentler singing side (no screaming "Valhalla!" here) and the more arguably more authentic rural voice of his junior partner, raised in small-town Illinois.
Aided by a cast of faithfull sessioneers, Plant and Kraus work through a terrific hour’s worth of rug-cutters, including a lively reworking of Lucinda Williams’ Can’t Let Go (on which Williams appears herself), and a somewhat darker interpretation of the Everly Brothers’ The Price Of Love. Americana has found its way into British folk in many forms over the years, and here the duo take on the late Scottish folkie Bert Jansch’s Don’t Bother Me, with Krauss rather than Plant taking point (he reciprocates on Go Your Way by Anne Briggs, one of the legion of British folk stars to emerge in the late ’60s and early ’70s (along with John Martyn and Sandy Denny) who became huge influences on early Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page in particular. Speaking of which, a pleasantly courageous cover of Jimmy Reed’s High And Lonesome by Plant and Krauss has an almost prog rock feel, due to its use of a mellotron to add a string canvass very different from the original’s boogie. There’s always, in my mind at least, a thin line between the various American roots music forms, be it blues or bluegrass, country or western (“We got both kinds!” to quote Bob of Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers), but what you get with Raise The Roof is a loving nod to these genres without ever falling into parody of cultural appropriation. As we come closer to this year’s end, it’s already a very strong candidate for inclusion in the end-of-annum lists.
Sting - The Bridge
Lastly, we come to an artist with whom I go back a long way. Not in any personal capacity, you understand, but the second album that I ever bought with my own money was Reggatta de Blanc by The Police. Come to think of it, Sting falls into the same category as Gabriel and Plant, having once been the focal point of a recording unit for only a handful of years, before going solo, in Sting’s case with the release of The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. I slavishly bought its follow-ups before the law of diminishing returns started to kick in. Like many a mainstream artist in the upper quartile of superstardom, Sting basically became boring, to me at least. I was never fussed by all that tabloid tattle about tantric activities, or the perma-smugness of a wealthy man with his own Tuscan vineyard and one of the most envious lifestyles in pop. It was just that his music stopped doing anything for me, which is not the case with those other two frontmen who went on to do equally interesting things with the longer branches of their careers.
Which is why The Bridge is a bit of a punt. Will it reconnect me with Sting’s songcraft? Will it provide me with something new and engaging? Actually, it does, with a breadth of styles encompassing pop and rock, the jazz his solo career has frequently embraced and even folk and electronica. Songs like the opener, Rushing Water, even hark back to The Police in their pomp, while the genuinely tender lyrics of the lively (if slightly MOR) If It’s Love and For Her Love (vaguely reminiscent of his Shape Of Your Heart from 1993’s Ten Summoner's Tales) draw on a reflective, romantic side that Sting has always been able to call on with heart, when not busy trying to demonstrate the contents of his bookshelf with pretentious references to Jungian philosophy and Shakespearian sonnets. The Book Of Numbers shows that Sting can still rock out, while the electronic beats of Loving You - arguably the album’s highlight - evokes a contemporary feel, with a distinctly dark soulfulness. He has, in the past, looked slightly twattish for his collaborations with hip-hop artists and the appropriation that entails, but here, Loving You gets the balance between modernity and intrigue absolutely right.
Amazingly, The Bridge is Sting’s 14th solo album, and while it lacks some of the edge of his earlier career, it’s entirely enjoyable, even if it falls, musically, into a category of records that will inevitably find their way into the Christmas stockings of grannies, bought for them at the Asda checkout. Yes, that puts The Bridge in a similar cadre as the likes of Coldplay and Ed Sheeran (and obviously Adele) but without wishing to sound ageist, you can’t help but feeling that Sting has earned the right to be so preeminent. As much as Sheehan, in particular, gets regularly feted, Sting has just fired off a warning reminder that he is still an absolute master of this stuff. As David Crosby demonstrated earlier this year with his masterful For Free, not all pop chops fade with age. Sting, who turned 70 in October, has shown, too, that age is not only just a number, but if you apply yourself, continuing to write and record new music long after the teenage posters have been torn down doesn’t have to be an exercise in mediocrity. Sting, consider me back!
No comments:
Post a Comment