Whole of the tune
The Waterboys’ new double album is a slick affair production-wise, but it would have repaid an edit of its sprawling track list
One of the chief joys of The
Waterboys is the carefree eclecticism with which they have conducted a career spanning four decades. Mainman Mike Scott, the only predictable constant, is constantly unpredictable – in his choice of fellow travellers, musical stylings and recording environments.
So it feels a tad cheeky to complain about the range on Out Of All This
Blue, a sprawling double album collection for his new home of BMG Records, which won’t be fenced in by expectations of The Waterboys’ signature Big Music or raggle taggle Celtic soul but dabbles in modern pop and hip-hop production effects without ever sounding like modern pop or hip-hop.
There is some continuity with 2015’s lumbering Modern Blues in that Scott has convened many of the same musicians, including his wingman Steve Wickham, Muscle Shoals bassman David Hood and Hammond organist “Brother Paul” Brown, but
Out Of All This Blue builds on its hoary blues bedrock with the pop gospel of Do We Choose Who We Love and processed funk and disco strings of If I Was Your Boyfriend.
It takes a moment to attune the ear to the slicker production sound and a good 90 minutes to wade through the good, bad and throwaway across its 23 tracks. Among the more gratifying experiments are Wickham’s keening rock’n’roll fiddle on the industrial bluegrass of The Connemara Fox, the warm, devotional mantra of Love Walks In, the eight-minute southern soul epic
Morning Came Too Soon and Kinky’s History Lesson, styled after Texan man o’ parts Kinky Friedman, in which Scott delivers an alternative potted history of the Second World War over a loping country beat.
Scott looks east as much as west for inspiration. Rokudenashiko is one of numerous love songs to his new wife, the Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi, and there are references to the Tokyo nightlife district of Roppongi on
Didn’t We Walk On Water, a carefree soul pop number with groovy stabs of mellotron and clavinet.
But the doubtless heartfelt tributes on Payo Payo Chin and Yamaben are more disposable ditties – and had Scott actually disposed of these and other flabbier tracks, he could have produced a more lovable album.
Veteran pop duo Sparks also make their BMG debut with their first album of all-new material since 2008’s Exotic Creatures of the Deep. They have hardly been napping in the interim, producing a pop opera, The Seduction of Ingmar
Bergman, and conjoining with Franz Ferdinand on the glorious
FFS, but once again they get to burst forth with idiosyncratic lyrical themes which are uniquely Sparks.
Hippopotamus contains songs inspired by French chanson, IKEA, a harassed God, historical satirical jokes and French film directors (on a number handily featuring French film director Leos Carax), delivered in quintessential Sparks style from heightened operatic pop to vaudevillian wit. By not taking themselves seriously, Sparks continue to demonstrate that they are serious about pop music.
Tori Amos is serious, period. But she has every reason to be, as the making of her latest album on the theme of renewal in the natural world was interrupted by the election of Donald Trump and the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Native Invader then took on a more personal dimension when her mother suffered a stroke. Amos marshals the raw emotions of the past year into her usual elegant, expansive pop, which is delicious to listen to, as if challenging through stealth. She keeps the drama in check throughout the proggy likes of Bang
and Benjamin, with the latter’s fuzz guitar and deft rhythmic changes being about as far out as she sails on this environmental voyage.
It takes a good 90 minutes to wade through the good, bad and throwaway across its 23 tracks