A Sense of Doubt blog post #3394 - New Paul Weller - 66 - Music Monday for 2406.03
I had the great opportunity to buy this album in London just when it came out.
I love Paul Weller, and I was able to buy his album at ROUGH TRADE in White Chapel! So, cool!
Love the new album.
66 - album - Paul Weller (2024)
https://oldgreycat.blog/2024/05/25/first-impressions-66-by-paul-weller/
First Impressions: 66 by Paul Weller
Seasons come, seasons go. Doesn’t much matter whether one features the sun and the other snow, or that spring and fall blur the boundaries between hot and cold. Paul Weller albums are reliable in the same cyclical sense. When was the last time his music didn’t do something for me? 2002, maybe, when Illumination failed to light my imagination—yet even that opened with “Going Places,” a contemplative song that I rank with his best.
66 sports a cool Peter Blake-designed cover and, like Fat Pop, is somewhat akin to a stack of wax, with the credits on each figurative 45 identifying such collaborators as Suggs, Dr. Robert (ex of the Blow Monkeys, not the Beatles song), Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, and some guy named Noel Gallagher. It’s available from the online Paul Weller store in a myriad of versions—vinyl, cassette and CD in both standard and deluxe versions, with the latter featuring four bonus tracks, plus a box set of 45s. However, thanks to my deluxe CD being stuck in a Heathrow queue, I’m writing about the standard 12-track version available on Apple Music.
The folky “Ship of Fools,” which features lyrics by Suggs, opens the set. It takes aim at the Tories (aka, for the Anglo-ignorant, conservatives), whose stewardship of the UK has, from Weller’s perspective, left the country torn asunder. One need not know or care about politics to enjoy the song-long metaphor, however; it could well be about the tech titans who wrecked the music industry or any number of other cretins. “Flying Fish,” which follows, finds Weller flopping about on shore due to life’s many distractions (“caught up in the thread/of plots we’ll soon forget”); anyone on social media will identify with it, I think. “Jumble Queen,” a collaboration with the literate Gallagher brother, spirals like a mini-twister, while the bluesy “Nothing”—another tag team with Suggs—and “My Best Friend’s Coat,” a collaboration with French singer/multi-instrumentalist Le SuperHomard, delve into love and friendship.
“Soul Wandering,” written with Bobby Gillespie, sports a taut R&B groove while expounding on his wandering spirit: “Each day I wake and try to shake these chains from me/They weigh me down in mental quicksand.” The album closer, “Burn Out,” slows things down while pondering both life in lockdown and a relationship’s possible end. Has his fire really gone out? (Likely not—the lyrics were written by Scottish composer Erland Cooper.)
The sonic stylings on 66 aren’t as madcap as those found on Fat Pop; the songs mostly echo the contemplative True Meanings and its live offspring, Other Aspects and An Orchestral Songbook, and flow together as if a pop symphony, but with Hannah Peel in the role handled long ago by Nelson Riddle. It’s sure to hit home with longtime fans, especially those who have enjoyed Weller’s latter-day work.
Paul Weller: 66 review – sumptuous rumination on older age springs some surprises
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/may/23/paul-weller-66-album-review
In this elegiac 17th solo album made with guests including Noel Gallagher, Weller contemplates mortality with sun-dappled ballads – but there’s still an experimental edge
Among the tracks on Paul Weller’s 17th solo album, A Glimpse of You isn’t really a standout. It’s melodically pretty, but a bit slight; pleasant enough, but unlikely to elbow The Changingman or Broken Stones from the setlist when its author plays live. Yet A Glimpse of You still has the capacity to bring the longstanding Weller fan up short. It happens in the second verse, which appears to depict Weller settling down on a park bench to contemplate his own mortality. “Into the gardens in blooming May,” he sings, his voice sounding weathered. “I find a wooden seat where I can wait until the end of the world.”
To which the more casual listener might respond: so what? It’s a long time since anyone considered rock music exclusively a young person’s game; we’re used to music that reflects the artist’s age. But this is Paul Weller we’re talking about, a man who spent the early years of his career making an enormous song and dance about the importance of youth – “you better listen man, because the kids know where it’s at”, “life is a drink and you get drunk when you’re young”, “there should be a youth explosion”, “I want us to be like Peter Pan”, etc, etc – and indeed, expressing utter mortification at the very idea of growing old: “The man that you once loved is bald and fat-uh!” he snapped, on 1979’s Private Hell, as if hair loss and weight gain were a fate too horrific to countenance.
Yet here he is, admittedly neither bald nor fat, but trumpeting his advanced years in the album’s very title – although one suspects 66 is named not just for Weller’s age, but to commemorate the year he views as pop’s annus mirabilis – and blithely singing about enjoying a little sit in the park, like one of Simon and Garfunkel’s aged Bookends: how terribly strange to be 70, or at least thereabouts.
In fact, Weller has made a far better job of growing up in public than anyone might have expected in the Jam’s first flush of fame. This largely down to his restlessness, his willingness to suddenly change his mind. It happened most recently with the trio of exploratory albums he made between 2008 and 2012, which succeeded in confounding his more conservative fans and shaking off the artistic torpor that afflicted him in the early 00s. There are still hints of the experimentalism of Wake Up the Nation or Sonik Kicks here – one of their musical touchstones was Krautrock, and there’s a distinctly motorik cast to the rhythm of Jumble Queen, while In Full Flight, a fantastic collaboration with production duo White Label, offers up a kind of dubbed-out, psychedelic take on early 60s soul, if such a thing can be imagined.
But more striking is 66’s elegiac tone. Weller has talked about curbing his famously relentless work rate, and a sense of slowing down seems to have seeped into 66. It’s everywhere, from the preponderance of sun-dappled ballads, to the affecting weariness that soaks closing track Burn Out, a song which recalls – and Weller’s more strict mod adherents may wish to look away now – Meddle-era Pink Floyd, to his decision to hand over lyrical duties to others on a number of tracks. Two of his chosen lyricists are Noel Gallagher and Bobby Gillespie, which suggests that Weller is a brave soul when it comes to outsourcing words.
But once you’ve got your head around the idea of a more sedentary, ruminative Paul Weller doing things like grasping for the notion of an afterlife (“I want to believe in something greater than me,” he sings on Soul Wandering) or clutching on to fleeting memories of the past on the profoundly melancholy Nothing, 66 has a lot to commend it. If Sleepy Hollow slightly overdoes the flute-assisted whimsy, and the Covid-inspired I Woke Up feels a little overwrought, then they’re compensated for by Ship of Fools, a collaboration with Madness frontman Suggs that carries something of the Kinks’ Afternoon Tea in its DNA; and the lovely, slow exhalation of Rise Up Singing, bolstered by Hannah Peel’s sumptuous Philly soul orchestration and a guitar solo that nods in the direction of You’re the Best Thing. It isn’t the only moment that evokes Weller’s time as the head of the Style Council: the years when their Francophile tendencies extended to employing an accordion player are reflected in the gorgeous, chanson-like waltz of My Best Friend’s Coat.
Paul Weller 66 Review: Star collaborators help The Modfather celebrate in sublime style
Up until lockdown’s Fat Pop, each Paul Weller album post-2008 possessed a distinct tang. But like its predecessor, 66 prefers to build on tested patterns, from Flying Fish’s slick ’70s disco to the celestial soul-electronica of In Full Flight.
READ MORE: Every Paul Weller Album Ranked!
Up front is the delightful folk strum of Ship Of Fools – lyrics by Suggs – and Jumble Queen, a head-banging Mod-rocker co-write with Noel Gallagher, auguring an unsettling mid-LP suite that sounds like late-era Style Council for ever more uncertain times, the Gallic waltz of My Best Friend’s Coat chief among them. There are missteps in the over-emoted Sleepy Hollow and I Woke Up, but otherwise earworm melodies abound, most strikingly in A Glimpse Of You and eco-lamenting Burn Out. There’s a sense throughout of Weller, the inveterate seeker, grasping for something tantalisingly out of reach – and, in doing so, creating a record of recurrent intrigue and frequent sublimity.
Track listing:
Ship of Fools
Flying Fish
Jumble Queen
Nothing
My Best Friend’s Coat
Rise Up SingingI
Woke Up
A Glimpse of You
Sleepy Hollow
In Full Flight
Soul Wandering
Burn Out
66 is out now on Polydor
Soul, Searching
Even before you put it on the turntable, that striking cover art, which even a casual pop fan might guess - although he's signed it, which helps - comes from the hand of Peter Blake, the man behind the collage that adorns Stanley Road (as well as obscure curio Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) indicates that Weller means business. He always has and he always does. The Woking Wonder is one of the few artists, alongside Nick Cave and a precious one or two others, who might actually be getting better as he gets older.
If, like me, you are inordinately fond of 2020’s superb On Sunset then you may proceed to your local record emporium with confidence, as 66 shares its winning combination of tradition and experimentation. There are song writing collaborations with several prominent pals - not something Weller has gone in for much before, although 'The Soul Searchers', the lovely opener to 2018's True Meanings, written with Villagers man Conor O'Brien, springs to mind. Suggs chip in to the rat race bemoaning ‘Ship Of Fools’, a gentle opener with a Traffic-like flute solo. Noel Gallagher helps with the parp and clang of the “checking news for conspiracies” ‘Jumble Queen’, a cut that bubbles with the class of vim that Mr G.'s solo records would benefit from. And even Bobby Gillespie gets it right with the acoustic guitar and Hammond driven groovy single ‘Soul Wandering’, which would have served as an appropriate alternate album title.
The sound - his ever changing modes - ranges from the widescreen disco-ish groove of ‘Flying Fish’, which then goes Telecaster twang with Weller gleefully telling us to "Look out", to the Bowie/’Sons Of The Silent Age’ melancholia of closer ‘Burn Out’. There’s the orchestral swell behind the choruses of the waltzing ‘My Best Friend’s Coat’ and the beautiful ‘I Woke Up’, the glorious “so glad I opened my eyes” starburst – with harp - of ‘Rise Up Singing’, and the breeze that ‘A Glimpse Of You’ floats upon. There's something of the artistic triumph of 2021’s An Orchestrated Songbook, in all this thanks to musical polymath Hannah Peel, who’s been chipping in since 2017’s A Kind Revolution, and her heavenly string arrangements. The horn charts, inventive and driving, are even better.
‘Nothing’ has the same kind of reminiscent longing for places and faces gone that featured on the title track of On Sunset. If there's lyrical looking back, and contemplating where he is, throughout - not his usual M.O. - as when he takes a seat in the garden to "wait 'til the end of the world" in 'A Glimpse Of You' or the opening lines of 'I Woke Up' where he awakes to find everything gone, everything changed, and nothing remaining the same, then that's surely allowable, given that he's getting on, a bit (he turns the 66 of the title this week). Still, this is Weller we're talking about, so he can follow the lullaby soul of 'Sleepy Hollow' (more dancing flute, and what sounds like a vibraphone) with ‘In Full Flight’, which is lifted by the voices of psychedelic soulsters Say She She, because the mod master always has his lugs out for something different.
“If I can do it, I can do it clean” the guvnor, who's "still searching" and imploring us to "bring back revolution", sings. Who does it better?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2406.03 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3258 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
No comments:
Post a Comment