Rod Stewart

Blood Red Roses

Post-American Songbook renaissance continues. Listening to Look

In Her Eyes, the opening track on Blood Red Roses, you’d be forgiven for forming the opinion that Rod has simply given up: succumbed to the ravages of time and reached for the autotune. But it actually offers evidence the former Face is still in the game. The canny Stewart eye remains on the commercial pop market, and if they like their vocals autotuned, then autotuned it is. Look In Their

Eyes is the album’s Graham Norton moment, a classically Stewart-ed uptempo ballad for the mainstream.

Meanwhile, there’s more than enough bounty for the scarfed hard-core (still clinging to postmod, sky-reaching hair that offers every indication that someone’s holding a balloon over it) that proves the pipes at centre stage still crackle with pitch-perfect power, not least a neatly contemporised assault on Rollin & Tumblin’.

Ten of these 13 songs bear a Stewart writing credit, and his lyrics are as touching and full of wit as ever. Farewell, while fleetingly reminiscent of The Killing Of Georgie (Part 1) in delivery, is a distinctly heterosexual ode to a fallen comrade and a bona fide Stewart classic. Rich in reminiscence, it’ll leave you raw and emotionally brimming.

Finely balanced between rock and pop, Blood Red Roses showcases some of Stewart’s best work in decades.

ian Fortnam