New Music

WHO

Polydor

The Who come out fighting for best long-player in years “All this music will fade, just like the edge of a blade...” shouts Roger Daltry, with the explosive defiance that was so thrilling on

Won’t Get Fooled Again. Decades later, he’s sticking two fingers up at something bigger even than The Establishment: the nature of time and change and perhaps mortality itself. “I’m not blue, I’m not pink, I’m just grey, I’m afraid,” he sings, disconsolately, setting the introspective yet angry tone for an album that represents a thundering late-career broadside from one of the most influential acts in rock. It also happens to be The Who’s best album in many years.

The band’s roots have always been buried in the asphalt and concrete of city life and the yearning, burning Street Song taps into the same poignant yet vitriolic energy as classics such as Teenage Wasteland.

Townshend’s guitar work is as tight and structurally supportive as it always was, driving but also expanding the potential of each song with economy, taste and power. Townshend’s vocals add rays of tight, illuminating harmony behind Daltry’s growled lyrics, which are like having a handful of gravel thrown in your face at times. There are more measured moments, too. Rockin’ In Rage and I Don’t Wanna Get

Wise echo some of the rock-opera stylings of Tommy, while Townshend steps up through the gears with his riffs until each track is really flying. Overall, the album is both a triumphant return to form and a kind of moving statement on the band’s own past that represents, symbolically, a last powerful swing of the Rickenbacker into the Marshall stack of history. [JD]

Standout track: All This Music Must Fade For fans of: Paul Weller, Small Faces