Popcorn time
The Band legend’s first solo album since 2011 is a blockbuster. By Mat Snow.
Robbie Robertson
ROBBIE ROBERTSON’s place in the pantheon rests on a portfolio of some 30 songs recorded over eight years and peaking half a century ago on The Band’s self-titled ‘Brown’ second album. Masterpieces of the miniaturist’s art, every sepia brushstroke evoked the stoically endured, rambunctiously enjoyed tragicomedy of America’s backwoods where the past was never really past.
It was the work of a brilliant semi-outsider – part Cayuga/Mohawk Canadian raised in Toronto – finding himself, as did his sometime boss and fellow semi-outsider Bob Dylan, by soaking up the undersung romance of hinterland America.
After The Band, Robbie wasn’t done finding himself. Perhaps it was the revelation as a teenager that his biological father was a Jewish professional gambler killed in a hitand-run accident before his birth that drew him to Neil Diamond, producing his 1976 album Beautiful Noise and absorbing from him the schmaltz and heroic sentimentality that makes him and Bruce Springsteen musical kin.
Then there is Robertson’s third root: the movies. Recruited by Martin Scorsese in 1980 as his resident go-to soundtrack guy, Robbie proceeded to make his own music larger (and louder) than life. “He’s a frustrated musician, and I guess I was a frustrated film-maker,” said Robertson in 2006. “So it was a perfect connect.” His former restraint was but a trace memory on his first proper solo album, 1987’s Robbie Robertson, wherein epic Americana was blown up to U2 proportions. His widescreen sound today is more Avengers: Endgame than ’87 Lethal Weapon, never mind John Ford’s Grapes Of Wrath, which had so inspired The Band. Everything on Sinematic is huge, layered, expertly grooved and overladen with Robertson’s parched voice hamming up lyrics which offset the standard portentousness of a rock great sermonising from the Mount (eg Hardwired, Let Love Reign and the nonetheless excellent Beautiful Madness) with underspun True Crime yarns (hence the film noir album title) like I Hear You Paint Houses (boasting a phoned-in Van Morrison vocal cameo), Shanghai Blues and the Orson Welles tribute, The Shadow.
Likewise his once uniquely eloquent guitar has now bloated to an Edge/Billy Gibbons futuro-rootsiness without the inventiveness of either. One pleasant instrumental, Wandering Souls, is like something Ry Cooder might do if he needed the money, and the other, Remembrance, like a newly discovered Gary Moore track. Put it all together, and the song Street Serenade, for example, sounds like the moodboard for a ’90s big budget Levi’s commercial. Similar genre-blending techniques and ingredients have driven Brixton’s Alabama 3 for over 20 years, but to punchier, wittier and more arresting ends.
Yet at 76 Robbie Robertson can still craft a consistent, catchy, superior sugar-rush rock album. Even if it’s as though Terrence Malick was directing the Thor franchise.