Album review: Sting’s 15th LP The Bridge an eclectic mix dripping with intrigue
The British singer-songwriter has a Las Vegas residency extending into 2022, but chances are his Caesar’s Palace audience won’t be treated to songs from The Bridge.
Album reviews for week of December 24, 2021:
FOLK/JAZZ/POP
The Bridge
Sting
A&M Records
★★★½
Sting has a Las Vegas residency extending into 2022 but chances are his Caesar’s Palace audience won’t be treated to songs from his 15th solo album. Unlike 2016’s sub-U2 rock outing 57th and 9th, with its open-ended themes of searching, travelling and the lure of the unknown, this one’s a far more eclectic mix of Celtic and British folk legends, dark tales of deception, recurring dreams and trammelled lust. The Bridge is as musically diverse as its subject matter: violins, accordions, brushed drums and Branford Marsalis’s wistful soprano sax rub shoulders with understated synths, traditional keys and the textured guitars of Dominic Miller, Sting’s loyal sideman of 20 years. There’s only one outright rock track, the crystalline opener Rushing Water, and a token pop song in the annoyingly trite If It’s Love, with its whistled hookline and hackneyed allegory of romantic obsession as reportable illness. The more engaging material dips in and out of folk and jazz: The Book of Numbers, on which Sting interrogates the scriptures; Harmony Road, a trip to the other side of the tracks; and The Hills on the Border, another pastoral parable dripping with atmosphere and intrigue.
Captain Bateman, a folk tale of an imprisoned seafarer who falls for his jailer’s daughter, stretches sparing strings over its jaunty rhythm, while The Bells of St Thomas (heralded by, yes, bells) is an otherwise subtle meditation on betrayal that speaks to a Renaissance-era painting by Dutch artist Peter Paul Rubens. Betrayal is, of course, a stock theme of Sting’s, and it finds its ultimate expression here on Loving You, a cuckolded husband’s catalogue of wounded devotion: “We made vows inside the church / To forgive each other’s sins / But there are things I have to endure / Like the smell of another man’s skin / If that’s not loving you, I don’t know what is …” Even more sinisterly, the song’s protagonist confesses he is “given to jealousy … and driven to violence”. It’s some distance from the neo-hippie drift of the title track, another largely acoustic song that pleads for unity as the world tries to deal with pestilence and climate change. Again, probably not one for a Vegas crowd out to hear the hits.
Phil Stafford
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JAZZ
Divide and Conquer
Johannes Luebbers Dectet
Earshift Music
To hear this outstanding album is to realise that something good is happening. It features beautifully written compositions from Melbourne-based Johannes Luebbers, completing his suite, the first half of which appeared on his 2019 album Other Worlds. His approach as a composer/arranger is unusually distinctive. Deeply consultative, he has written exceedingly sympathetic platforms for five musicians in his 10-piece ensemble, enabling them to express at length their brilliant improvisational talents: saxophonists Michael Wallace and Angela Davis, trumpeter Paul Williamson, bassist Hiroki Hoshino and pianist Andrea Keller. The result is a triumph: five tracks, each a tour de force. I remember what was termed the “Australian jazz explosion” in the late 1970s to early ’80s, centred on Sydney, which provided jazz with momentum to the end of the millennium. A comparable explosion has occurred in Melbourne in the past 20 years, and there is perhaps no better exemplar to illustrate that phenomenon than this superb album.
Eric Myers
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PUNK ROCK
I’m Sorry Sir, That Riff’s Been Taken
Hard-Ons
Cheersquad
The prospect of You Am I’s Tim Rogers stepping to the mic for Hard-Ons is surely the stuff of Aussie rock fantasy. Rounding out 40 years as a band, the Sydney stalwarts capitalise on Rogers’s pub-forged vocal range across this 13th album, from spring-loaded power-pop (Hold Tight, The Laws of Gossip) to pure thrash (Humiliated/Humiliator). Singing lyrics written mostly by guitarist Peter “Blackie” Black, Rogers remains nimble on the tonal front too, selling the chiming romance of Needles and Pins before diving straight into Shove It Down. He consistently keeps apace with the band’s blurted attack, which is especially impressive against the roiling rhythm section of bassist Ray Ahn and drummer Murray Ruse on the Who-esque centrepiece Frequencies. The album’s longest song at nearly five minutes, that wild track sees Rogers match Hard-Ons’ incendiary interplay with his most over-the-top vocal turn here. It spits just as many sparks as you’d hope from this brash collision of legends.
Doug Wallen
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WORLD/JAZZ
Silver Lining
Kate Pass Kohesia Ensemble
Independent
Perth double bassist Kate Pass’s preoccupation with Persian music continues with the Kohesia Ensemble. Her sensibilities sharpened by other WA-stamped albums with the singer Tara Tiba, the trio Daramad and her debut release with the octet, the bandleader strikes gold with Silver Lining, a subtle synthesis of East and West. Original repertoire crafted predominantly by Pass with her comrade, saz-lute whiz Reza Mirzaei and his fellow Australian-Iranian, ney flautist/daf drummer Esfandiar Shahmir, crackles with the energy of live performance as traditional Middle Eastern influences coalesce with Western jazz. This veritable Persian carpet of a set featuring vibrant tonal colours, evolving motifs and scintillating solos starts and finishes in robust fashion with blasts of trumpet and saxophone. Elsewhere, there is light and shade: a superb solo bass intro sets up the title track, while a saz break rides the camel-like gait of Shifting Sands, and the outstanding Listening To Trees branches into a sublime piano/ney duet before regathering intensity.
Tony Hillier
ROCK
Everybody Loves
The Predators
Independent
Brisbane musicians Ian Haug, John Collins and Steve Bishop have been playing together on and off for more than 30 years. That interconnectivity is inherently present on Everybody Loves, the trio’s debut album as The Predators after forming some 16 years prior. Though Haug and Collins are best known for their time in rock royalty Powderfinger – the quintet for whom Bishop was the original drummer – it’s worth not going into the album expecting My Happiness. Instead, the trio angles for jangly pop-rock with a tinge of psychedelia. It works in bursts – The Stooges-aping You Stepped In adds some much-needed tension, as does the bluesy Taking Fire, which sees a formidable turn from Bishop on lead vocals. Too often, though, the trio lapses into a sort of adult-contemporary complacency with disposable guitar riffs and lyrics that scan as lazy. There’s certainly enough here to get your head nodding along at a pub gig, but the shadow of The Predators’ predecessor still inevitably looms large overhead.
David James Young
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Album reviews for week of December 18, 2021:
HOLIDAY/SEASONAL
Paul Kelly’s Christmas Train
Paul Kelly
EMI Music
Paul Kelly already looms large in the seasonal firmament thanks to his ballad How to Make Gravy, an authentic snapshot of familial drama that’s now 25 years old. But that perennial centrepiece is now part of a much larger spread, with this robust double album saluting not just Christmas itself, but the holiday’s origins and many derivations.
Kelly is more interested in the season’s far-reaching cultural significance rather than simply cutting a fleeting soundtrack to it. To bolster that prismatic approach, Kelly draws on a cast of collaborators that echoes his similarly varied Merri Soul Sessions album (2014) while highlighting another strong cross-section of talent. As someone who sings carols with his family every year, Kelly also enlists his own close kin, from his daughters Maddy and Memphis singing harmonies on the adapted John Donne poem Nativity and his sister Mary-Jo arranging the carol-style vocals for Little Drummer Boy, to his nephew Dan playing banjo on a version of the 19th century tune Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing, which Kelly discovered via Sufjan Stevens.
As you can tell from that last sentence, the source material for these 23 songs is disparate, indeed. Broadcaster Waleed Aly narrates verses from the Qur’an dealing with Jesus for Surah Maryam, while Lior leads the Hebrew prayer Shalom Aleichem. Marlon Williams renders O Holy Night in te reo Maori with help from the Dhungala Children’s Choir, and Sweet Jean’s Alice Keath sings a verse of Silent Night in the original German over ukulele and steel guitar. Highlights abound across this generous 75-minute outing: Casey Bennetto’s song Swing Around the Sun deserves to become a new holiday standard, while Linda Bull belting out Darlene Love’s Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home) is alone worth the price of admission. Emma Donovan brings her deep vocal smoulder to The Virgin Mary Had One Son, and Kelly even updates How to Make Gravy with an agile new arrangement. In keeping with that song’s nuanced story, he knows that you can’t possibly please everyone during the holidays. But he sure tries – and largely succeeds.
Doug Wallen
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CLASSICAL
Beethoven X: The AI Project
Beethoven Orchestra Bonn
Modern Recordings
A pile of sketches amounting to 250 bars is all we have of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, a project he never lived to finish. Now a team led by Matthias Roder of the Karajan Institute, Salzburg, has used artificial intelligence to complete two movements from these sketches, and the results are intriguing. On a surface level, Beethoven’s characteristic rhythms are persuasively recreated, as are other basic elements of his style. At times it sounds uncannily like Ludwig. However, as an extended composition this AI recreation sounds flat and uninteresting. The opening Scherzo begins convincingly but lacks structural continuity. The following Rondo is extremely odd, with organ solos played by Walter Werzowa that sound trite and more fit for a concerto. A noble adagio theme midway fairs better and is true to the composer. The performances by Beethoven Orchestra Bonn — conducted by Dirk Kaftan — are excellent, but ultimately, British musicologist Barry Cooper’s completion of the Tenth from 1988 is more satisfying.
Graham Strahle
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ROOTS
Long Road Back Home
Dave Brewer
Sundown Records
Perth musician Dave Brewer made his name in Sydney between 1980 and 2000 as one of that city’s finest blues, jazz and R&B guitarists, plying his trade with the Dynamic Hepnotics and Mighty Reapers, among others. Long Road Back Home is his third solo album since returning to the west, and is partly a family affair. Son Riley co-writes a track (Make Everything Alright) and Nashville-based nephew Ryan plays keys, along with Hammond organist Clayton Doley, a longtime collaborator who also featured on Brewer’s 2013 album Night Walkin’. Brewer handles lead vocals and lets his guitar do most of the talking in between. Not a note is wasted, with double bass, piano and tenor sax rounding out the minimalist palette. Brewer’s voice and playing recall virtuoso American jazz/blues guitarist and singer Robben Ford: he has a similar lightness of tone and fluid technique on 11 original tracks. As a whole, this superb set is almost impossible to break down into highlights. That said, if Hard To Say Goodbye To Your Best Friend doesn’t spring a tear, check your pulse.
Phil Stafford
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ALTERNATIVE/EXPERIMENTAL
The Atlas Underground Fire
Tom Morello
Mom + Pop Music
Tom Morello has remained admirably prolific since the golden era of his generation-shaping band Rage Against The Machine, having lent his talents to Audioslave and the E Street Band. It’s a shame, then, that on the renowned guitar-hero’s third solo outing, decades of experience fails to bear the fruits one might have expected from the rock veteran. The dozen tracks that make up The Atlas Underground Fire feel like open-mic night in Morello’s living room, with lead vocal duties being passed from Bring Me The Horizon’s Ollie Sykes for the trashy Let’s Get The Party Started, to dance pop-producer Mike Posner on the alarmingly crass Naraka, and even his old boss Bruce Springsteen and plus-one Eddie Vedder for a strained rendition of AC/DC’s Highway To Hell. Country star Chris Stapleton and Damian Marley clamour for the sign-up sheet, too. Morello’s attempt at variety is admirable, but an all-star cast, crisp production and occasional bursts of his trademark glitchy guitar sounds can’t prevent the results feeling both underdeveloped and haphazard.
Alasdair Belling
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POP/ROCK
Music of the Spheres
Coldplay
Parlophone Records
British pop-rockers Coldplay are no strangers to invoking astronomy in their music, having first encouraged us to “look at the stars” in 2000 hit Yellow, and cosmic exploration forms the main thesis of its ninth album. These 12 tracks are a rousing, albeit muddled, celestial journey; a celebration of humanity and an inquiry into our place in the universe. In true Coldplay fashion, choruses fit for stadium chanting abound, as on the uplifting groove of Higher Power and rollicking Humankind. Notable collaborations come from Selena Gomez on sweet ballad Let Somebody Go, K-pop boy band BTS on My Universe, and both We are King and Jacob Collier on the stunning a cappella tune Human Heart. Album closer Coloratura is a 10-minute epic that captures the definition of its title. Despite a few surprising moments, though, this is cookie-cutter pop awash with synths. It will disappoint anyone hoping the band reverts to its alt-rock roots. The album isn’t cohesive, and collaborators seem chosen for their mass appeal rather than to aid any underlying artistic vision.
Emily Ritchie
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