How WELLER found WELLNESS POP through
The Modfather’s second album of new music in ten months stopped him from ‘ going potty’ in lockdown
Adrian Thrills
PAUL WELLER: Fat Pop (Volume 1) (Polydor) Verdict: Effortless excellence ★★★★✩ ST. VINCENT: Daddy’s Home (Loma Vista) Verdict: Woozy 1970s homage ★★★★✩ THE BLACK KEYS: Delta Kream (Nonesuch) Verdict: Hypnotic blues ★★★★✩
ONE of the few positives of a lockdown now happily coming to an end has been its impact on pop’s most restless souls. With tour plans in tatters, artists from Taylor Swift to Van Morrison have simply stayed in and made new music. Continuing his latecareer purple patch, Paul Weller is now joining the club.
It’s only ten months since he last topped the charts with his 15th solo album, On Sunset, but he’s used his enforced isolation to good effect, capturing ideas on his phone and adding piano, guitar and vocals in his home studio before getting his band to play their parts remotely.
The upshot is yet another solo record — one that Weller says stopped him from ‘going potty’ in the past year. Fat Pop (Volume 1) is his fourth LP in four years, and it taps into a rich vein of songwriting that has sustained him through 2017’s A Kind Revolution (a return to rock after a period of experimentation), 2018’s True Meanings (pastoral and acoustic) and On Sunset’s lavish summer pop.
No single style dominates this time around. There are guitar-driven rock songs, 1970s-style funk numbers and soulful tracks punctuated with strings and horns.
It’s all held together by the essential Wellerness of some effortlessly excellent tunes and lyrics that touch on everything from the pitiful world of a keyboard warrior to the ups and downs of home life in lockdown.
PRODUCER Jan ‘Stan’ Kybert wanted to call the album Greatest Hits due to its focus on tracks lasting no more than three minutes, but Weller has already made two of those as a solo act — Modern Classics and More Modern Classics — and Fat Pop is a decent description of what’s on offer here, with the ‘Volume 1’ suggesting there’s even more to come.
The legacy of quarantine looms large. The funky title track is a celebration of how music can be a godsend in adversity. Glad Times, a yearning soul ballad on a par with The Style Council’s You’re The Best Thing, is steeped in lockdown melancholy.
The kitchen sink drama Failed harks back to Weller’s years fronting The Jam.
A string of special guests are well chosen, maintaining Weller’s habit of working with both older and younger musicians. Andy Fairweather Low, of 1960s band Amen Corner, is a powerful presence on the soulful Testify. There are cameos from Weller’s daughter Leah and young Liverpudlian singer and guitarist Lia Metcalfe.
There’s the odd misstep. Cosmic Fringes finds Weller imitating Blur — ironic considering his influence on Britpop. But with composer Hannah Peel adding sumptuous strings, there’s plenty to admire in an album that’s short, sharp and low on filler.
SINGER- songwriter Annie Clark streamlines her approach on her sixth album as St. Vincent — and daddy’s Home is all the better for it.
Moving away from the electronic rock of 2017’ s Masseduction, Texas-raised Clark shuns complex arrangements in favour of soft vocal harmonies and woozy retropop in the style of Lana del Rey.
The album title is a reference to her stockbroker father, who was released from jail in 2019 after serving nine years for his part in a stock manipulation scheme. As well as examining the impact of his imprisonment on his family — ‘You did some time, well I did some time too,’ she sings — it seeks inspiration from his collection of vintage LPs.
Clark (who took the name St. Vincent from a song by Nick Cave) was introduced to classic rock and soul by her father, and daddy’s Home looks partly to the sounds of 1970s New York for inspiration.
Among the touchstones are Stevie Wonder (who wrote Living For The City about The Big Apple in 1973) and local heroes Steely dan. A New York influence extends to her lyrics, too.
With co-producer Jack Antonoff adding clavinet and 1980s synths, ...At The Holiday Party tells of Broadway lights and screenplays.
With lap steel guitar and electric piano to the fore, down And Out downtown is a snapshot of the city before gentrification.
It’s an album that reveals more about St. Vincent than her previous releases, but there’s still a knowing edge beneath its looselimbed musicianship.
CLARK compares her music, unfavourably, to Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and Tori Amos on The Melting Of The Sun, and there’s a wry aside — ‘if life’s a joke, then I’m dying laughing’ — on The Laughing Man.
There’s also, on My Baby Wants A Baby, an unlikely re-working of Sheena Easton’s 9 To 5. Clark’s new version sees her debating the pros and cons of parenthood, but the similarities between the two songs (which she insists were accidental) add a bizarre twist.
IN A strong week for releases, Nashville-based rockers The Black Keys hold their own.
Singer-guitarist dan Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney have long looked to the blues for inspiration, but they’ve rarely sounded as raw or mesmerising as on covers album delta Kream.
Their focus is on a distinct style — the hill country blues played in North Mississippi juke joints — but delta Kream isn’t an archaeological dig.With slide guitarist Kenny
Brown and bassist Eric deaton turning the Keys from a duo into a quartet, it’s an electrifying ride.
Most of its tracks were written by the late bluesmen RL Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, though there are also songs made famous by John Lee Hooker and others.
What impresses most, though, is an immediacy that stems from all 11 songs being recorded in just ten hours.
Among the highlights are Kimbrough’s Come On And Go With Me and Burnside’s Going down South, on which Auerbach sings in an eerie falsetto over Carney’s shuffling drums. This is the blues revisited with swing and swagger.