![]() ![]() He is, and has always been, about music, and clothes, and details. But intoned in Weller’s inimitable husk – and with a long, gorgeous, funky instrumental passage that refuses to settle on genre – it more than bears repeating.In an inconsistent world of ever-changing rules, Weller is a constant. That mere stuff doesn’t make you happy is clearly not news. Materialism is a busted flush, muses Weller: “Little came from having more,” he sings. Meanwhile, More is an eloquent centrepiece on an album whose spiritual leaning is a far cry from Oasis calling their most bloated and least mindful album Be Here Now just to ape George Harrison. “All the wealth is hidden, diamonds that glisten and solid gold,” croons Weller. We are puny “little fireworks, exploding in the streets”, just pawns in a bigger power game. The song’s realisations are couched in grace and beauty, but they are bleak. On Rockets, a graceful and emotive closer, Weller emulates Bowie again, underscoring their shared intonations. The album’s most riveting two tracks are – of all things – treatises on value. Watch the video for the title track of On Sunset by Paul Weller Here, a Col3trane guest spot and well-turned textures don’t make up for the song’s pat, woolly lyrics, which impede the consummate glide of the rest of Weller’s words. All these excellent found-sound, retro-futurist tendencies aren’t enough to carry Earth Beat, however. Halfway in, the song finds room for analogue warbles, shimmering bits and throbbing pieces, applause. Despite the glam of the title, the track never actually goes disco, but Weller hymns the liberation of the dancefloor to a blissed-out, Metronomy-tinged take on soul. Perhaps strangest of all, in January, he released an EP, In Another Room, full of musique concrète.Ī hangover from that experiment makes its way on to Mirror Ball, the album opener. From 2008’s 22 Dreams onwards, Weller has dabbled in all sorts of outre soundmaking, releasing albums as varied as they were regular. In 2009, matter met anti-matter on a song called 7 & 3 Is the Striker’s Name, a collaboration between Weller and My Bloody Valentine feedback-merchant Kevin Shields. In 2008, Weller confessed to a penchant for cosmic jazz, releasing Song for Alice, to mark the 2007 death of Alice Coltrane Robert Wyatt played trumpet on it. Where once Weller was synonymous with gruff stylistic intolerance preserved in aspic – the sort of man who watched his barber like a hawk, lest he trim a millimetre off the wrong part of Weller’s chiselled haircut, a cultural figure who could mobilise a motorcade of Lambrettas with just a nod – this ever-more mutable “Changingman” has actually presided over a decade of wild musical experimentation. “You suffer hurt because you can’t let go,” Weller sighs benevolently. There is more than a little Buddhism going on here too. “I don’t need all the things you hold in high regard/ They mean nothing at all,” he sings, again without disdain.Ī song literally called Equanimity swerves away from On Sunset’s core soul and solicits the Beatles and David Bowie. The video, filmed in his Black Barn studio, features a cameo from a shiny silver statue of the Buddha. On a song called Village, he extols his own contentment. Even before lockdown, Weller’s just-so hair had grown long and flowing. There is more than a little zen abroad, too. ![]() There is warmth and succour here, undercut with a playful scattering of mischievous sounds orchestral soul with eloquent quirks nuances that hark back to Weller’s second band, the Style Council, whose keys player Mick Talbot contributes Hammond organ to three tracks. This is not the kind of sunset in which mortality looms, but where the gentler evening light casts everything in a fresh aspect. The song, it turns out, is a microcosm of the album – a sunset-within-a-Sunset, one where Weller ponders maturity and its epiphanies, dancing and inner peace, while flicking through racks of vintage soul sides. ![]() “The world I knew has all gone by,” Weller notes, without rancour. Soon, a jazz flute kicks in heady 60s female vocal harmonies and classy vintage string arrangements light up the song’s dazzled take on the passage of time. But on Sunset, “the sun was higher than it ever was before,” this son of Surrey reminisces. ![]()
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