NEW ALBUMS
After 40 years, Weller is still the suburban outsider. Now, in an blend of rock, jazz and soul, is his hippy message of love and peace Pat Gilbert. Illustration by Katie Edwards.
Paul Weller’s latest revolution, Kasabian, Gorillaz, Hawkwind, Oumou Sangaré, Jane Weaver, Blondie, Don Bryant…
Paul Weller A Kind Revolution PARLOPHONE. CD/DL/LP
Unbelievable perhaps to some who’ve lived through it all, it was 40 years ago this May that Paul Weller debuted with The Jam’s In The City, his sullen teenage features glaring out from the sleeve dressed in a black Burton suit. The idea back then that the bolshie 19-year-old builder’s son would endure as one of the UK’s most prolific and successful music icons would have had a Leicester Citywinning-the-league implausibility about it. Sheer grit and a boundless appetite for self-improvement have sustained Weller, via The Jam, Style Council and 25 years of solo recordings, as an extraordinarily fertile artist. But how his creative ambitions have translated with his ‘audience’ has always been the rub. And A Kind Revolution’s space-age, deep soul grooves, electronica punk, waltzing chanson and jazzy, Aladdin Sane Bowie-isms will offer another interesting and unexpected twist to the story. The latest phase in Weller’s career can be traced back to 2008, when 22 Dreams’ eclectic mix of folk, rock, psychedelia and – reaching out to hitherto verboten realms – electronic music were blended into a double album of supreme confidence and open-mindedness. After 2010’s angry Wake Up The Nation, his last two albums, 2012’s Sonik Kicks and 2015’s Saturns Pattern, took the thirst for experimentation ever further: the former a metallic postpunk corker with dancehall bass and cut’n’paste studio techniques, the latter an oft-challenging adventure into cosmic soundscapes and genrebending strangeness. Weller’s vision for A Kind Revolution was to further explore the territory mapped out by Saturns Pattern’s rich sonic interrogations but that clearly isn’t where the LP has ended up. Instead, there’s an old-fashioned warmth that suffuses its many stylistic twists, and which despite its electronic inflections and polished production sounds like a combo of time-served musicians relishing the mash up of blues, jazz, rock and folk. Such is its diversity that no one track sums up the whole, though when the needle hits the grooves for the opener Woo Sé Mama you immediately get a whiff of A Kind Revolution’s bullish intent, the track channelling Peacock Suit from Heavy Soul’s preening Weller-rock vibrations, with joyous whooping backing vocals courtesy of ’60s soul legends P.P. Arnold and Madeline Bell. Straight after comes the equally vibrant Nova, beginning with a plaintive, chugging verse before, aided by the youthful vim
“A CRUNCHCHORD JUBILEE WITH BLOOPING SYNTHS THAT SUMMONS AN INTERPLANETARY NEW WAVE MISSION TO ANOTHER GALAXY.”
of The Strypes’ guitarist Josh McClorey, it explodes into a crunch-chord jubilee embellished by blooping synths that summon the notion of an interplanetary new wave mission to another galaxy. No old-school Weller stylist could bemoan this impressive opening salvo, but the heart of this album lies not in these stirring introductory outbursts but in the suite of soulful tunes that follow. At the core of these is the extraordinary The Cranes Are Back, a declarative piano ballad that salutes the beginning of a new dawn, where the return of these sacred birds – and, punningly, the machines used in building construction – symbolise hope and rejuvenation. If one thought that Weller had, in four decades and several hundred songs, exhausted every chord change available, then the lush, uplifting glide into the song’s bridge suggests otherwise, hinting at an admiration for the hymnal moods of contemporary jazz magus Kamasi Washington’s The Epic, as well as, the careworn spirituality of Coltrane and Donald Byrd. Of the other mid-album songs – among them the Memphis tones of Long Long Road and funky, keening She Moves With The Fayre (with trumpet and middleeight vocal by Robert Wyatt) – it’s One Tear that stands out as the Big Statement here: featuring an intertwined vocal from Boy George, whom Weller has rated since their parallel ’80s forays into blue-eyed soul, its undulating deep house groove and dubstep bass underpin a lyric decrying a planet whose moral compass has gone awry. In this world, it’s as if only music can heal humanity’s ills; or at least salve them. If this sounds like heavy, globally-minded stuff, then two other key tracks locate the record in far more personal space. Hopper, a delightful ode to the work of artist Edward Hopper, all swinging brass and loose jazzy feel, is an unexpected delight, while the New York theme is further explored in the song of the same name, a romantic story of a “crystal kiss” evolving into a fever dream of instrumental improv and merry-go-round organ. It’s musical details like that exquisite Hammond part, coaxed by Weller sidekick Andy Crofts, that lend A Kind Revolution its magical, homely allure; indeed, recorded in Weller’s own Black Barn studio in rural Surrey, there’s a strong sense of the familial and the spiritual conjoined in the performances, with drummer Ben Gordelier enjoying letting rip on the fills that grace Satellite Kid, a blues about a proud immigrant that doubles as a comment on the singer’s own self-image as the eternal suburban outsider, plus appearances from old cohorts Steve Cradock and Steve Pilgrim, and even Paul’s wife Hannah providing woozy Star Trek backing vocals on The Cranes Are Back. The album – just 10 tracks in all – finishes with The Impossible Idea, a waltzing, stagey number that seems to borrow its melody from Mary Poppins’ Let’s Go Fly A Kite, and which leaves the listener on a joyous high, reaching for the better place that A Kind Revolution suggests the human race deserves. It’s a fitting finale to an album that ranks among his finest work, not just for its strident messages of hope, but also for simply possessing such a high quotient of unimpeachable songs. A Kind Revolution, then, that we should embrace.