PAUL KELLY

Nature COOKiNG ViNYL 8/10 Another minor classic by Australia’s rock laureate

Kelly’s 24th solo album is to some extent the Venn-diagram overlap between a couple of its recent predecessors. For 2016’s Seven Sonnets And A Song, Kelly – Australia’s nearest equivalent to a Bruce Springsteen figure – co-wrote with Shakespeare. On 2017’s superb Life Is Fine he tapped back into the exuberant rock’n’roll that made his name in the mid-1980s. Nature is a great rock’n’roll album for which Kelly has borrowed lyrics from Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath, among others. Unsurprisingly, however, the most ably realised tracks are all Kelly’s own work, most notably “With The One I Love” and the mordant confessional “A Bastard Like Me”.