Genre: Pop/Rock
Format: Flac + cue + log
Released: 1987
Label: Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab / UDCD-546
"WITHOUT FREEDOM FROM the past," sings a typically philosophical Sting on one track called 'History Will Teach Us Nothing', "things will only get worse."
This may be true. Buckminster Fuller has, according to the sleeve notes, said so too. But in the fact of 1985's Dream Of The Blue Turtles, history has certainly taught us that freedom from the pop past of The Police allows a more versatile and sophisticated, less obviously cynical Sting. Finally finished with all the silly voices and dippy white reggae jogging rhythms, freed of the bass-drums-guitar format and adding a jazz inflection to his work, the star in Sting was beginning to shine in a new kind of way. And on the evidence of this second solo studio LP – a double, no less – it seems that Sting will only get better.
Though brilliant in places, Blue Turtles was a patchy collection. On Nothing Like The Sun, musical Sting seems to have solved most of his stylistic difficulties. It's a much more even textured album. Where different styles stick out – as during the musical tour of Manhattan on the affectionate 'Englishman In New York' – it is because they are meant to. Among the musicians credited here are Kenny Kirkland and Branford Marsalis (again); Eric Clapton, Andy Summers, Mark Knopfler and Hiram Bullock variously on guitar (this time Sting sticks mostly to bass), Gil Evans and his orchestra on an enjoyable version of Jimi Hendrix's 'Little Wing', and Ruben Blades doing a Spanish talkover in the moving 'They Dance Alone'.
Needless to say, then, the playing is impeccable throughout. But that's not the point. Sting can now juxtapose pieces as various as a piece of sweaty, thumping R&B ('We'll Be Together' – the album's sequel to 'If You Love Somebody Set Them Free'), an updated tongue-in-cheek version of the story of Noah's Ark set to a piece of jazz sleaze ('Rock Steady'), and a song based around a mournful melody from German composer and Brecht collaborator Hans Eisler ('The Secret Marriage'), and still make it all sound shamelessly, seamlessly Sting.
Lyrical Sting meanwhile still spends a lot of time singing about love, mostly in songs that have the word "heart" in the title – 'The Lazarus Heart', 'Be Still My Beating Heart'. Best of this bunch is 'Straight To My Heart', a simple fresh-sounding song built around what feels like a flamenco-derived rhythm.
After love, Sting's next favourite subject is death, in various guises. The best part of this album is side two, on which concerned Sting first takes a tragic view of history in 'History Will Teach Us Nothing', then sings about torture and the disappeared in Chile on 'They Dance Alone' (a song that also refers to his own mother, recently deceased, to whom the album is dedicated) and finishes with 'Fragile', a hymn to mortality apparently inspired by a friend of Sting's being murdered by the Nicaraguan Contras. On the second or third play, this reviewer found that sequence reducing him to tears.
It's a measure of what makes solo Sting special that after so many years in the hype machine, living a lifestyle based on god only knows what riches in the bank, he has finally found the will and the voice to sing simply and affectingly about political subjects like the arms race, the miner's strike or torture in Chile – a country to which, as part of The Police, he once actually paid an official visit.
At heart, he's clearly just another northern romantic. Idealist Sting counterposes political tragedy against the consolation of love, still tempering both sides of the equation with a vague mysticism. These songs are sensitive, literate, intelligent, thoughtful, moving and occasionally very funny too. There aren't too many stars who can manage all that and we should value Sting for it. Dave Rimmer, 1987
2 коментара:
DL
Enjoy
can't download, it's not in english.
thanks
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