0080. The Style Council
Café Bleu
(This one has been somewhat of a white whale for me as the random page generator picked it out in the beginning of march and I've tried to find ever since. A friend has got the album, but as he lives 600 kilometers away I couldn't just pop over and have a listen. When he tried to rip it via iTunes (fair use! only for the review and I'd erased the files afterwards) and send it over the files didn't work. Finally we (or rather, my friend) tracked it down on a music service I won't mention the name of (mostly due to their inability to compensate musicians for the music and partly due to their foppish self-serving commercials) and had a listen.)
Aaanyway:
The Style Council was Paul Weller (ex-The Jam) and Mick Talbot (ex-Dexys Midnight Runners (left way before yesterday's album)) and a huge chunk of honorary councilors who together made political pop in a variety of styles. I got to hand it to them that there are few (very few) who can pull off the feat of making political pop sound as good or as much pop without going into cliché posing as they navigate between anything from easy listening to soul. Also about half of the tracks are instrumental.
The first song with a song (eeh... you know what I mean) is the fairly naked The Whole Point Of No Return which is just Paul with his guitar and I'd say it's the best track on the album. For the rest I, however, favour the instrumental tracks: they could easily made into the score for a film (not a movie, movies are for entertainment while films are for inspiration and thought) and succeed to tug on the emotional strings better than any of the ones with lyrics. Just check out the upbeat celebration of Dropping Bombs On The White House (I think I just got flagged in some government database or other as I posted this) or Me Ship Came In.
And I'm sorry, but there's onte track I got to warn you about: the rap-track A Gospel. Cause... Well okay, it was the eighties, but still. The less said (both about it an on it) the better.
But apart from that one track the rest makes for a great album (if a little bit too smooth) and even though I've never liked anything Tracy Thorn's been in (well, not anything I've heard until this date at least), The Paris Match makes her sound like a born jazz club singer...
