Pride: Album Review
I've never met Robert Palmer, but I love hearing those successive stories by those who have, each primarily astonished that this smooth cat has an Albert Tatlock accent. Judging by his music, I bet Palmer loves the ensuing surprise, confusion, the mad effect.
It's been hard hardening-up Palmer's career until Pride. Clues had two sublime tracks, with the remainder the absolute pits. The title song and the ridiculously great Johnny And Mary did, however, show that Palmer was starting to spread a few clues around himself. Ensuing singles have confirmed, not only that can Palmer be an unlikely (after this long!) commercial hit, but that he has the makings of an artist - Pride is the culmination of the process. It's an amazing and difficult LP, with mad effects to the fore.
It has storylines and shape. It rises to the heights, often reminding me of Joni Mitchell's profound and depressing 'Hejira' - the old smoothie is revelling in his new-found ability to spread difficulties and general (isn't he or is he, after all, an old tosser or long-standing?) alarm.
I adore his voice because, contrary to what it should be (70s hacks told us it was Nat King Cole relived), it's so ordinary it surprises you: a blank white soul voice, Hall 'n Oates (in many ways Palmer's partners) do the same thing, and instead of restricting both sets of artists because it isn't the real black thing, it gives them a hell of a lot of room to manoeuvre in.
Pride is such a big music it, literally, bursts. What's left is white blank soul smithereens of an initial energy that didn't have the right vehicle (aka most of Clues). At any given moment on the LP there is hardly less than three levels operating - four if you include, perhaps most important of all, Palmer's own producing and arranging, which is dazzling and huge.
First there's the backing music, performed by players (bassist Frank Blair especially) who're so good they've decided to turn the music inside out, stick it in a washing machine, then send it through Bill Burrough's "cut up" method - and still prove they can make it sound great! It's dance music for people with no legs: Tatlock meets Askey, the result is askew.
Then there's the smoothie's larynx. On It's Not Difficult (like his voice, they're all ordinary/boring/smug/smugly brilliant titles) it itself is honing in in from about four different levels. The effect is, again, quite mad, but it's hitting on the point too early...
For, lastly, there's this constant buzzing synth barrage in the background - that's more (tastefully) 'Hejira' than Ultravox - like a great dark set of clouds over the whole album, that even the overall dance end pop music can't obliterate. He's got very arty, has old Robert. And mad.
The shape of the thing: side one is, for pristine Palmer, practically dirty and unkempt. The songs rattle along in pretend-shambles, only lifting up to strength and masculine assertion (his black leather phase) with the closing You Are In My System (about Poland? Afghanistan? Brut aftershave?). As throughout the album, the tracks are joined together (why don't more do this?), there's laughing and heavy breathing wedged between the smithereens of songs.
But the essential point about side the first is the mad inclusion of Want You More (a ballad with a great hint of 'Hejira'-esque doom) right in the centre of it, breaking the flow up, changing it. And the effect is exactly matched on the second side with Kool And The Gang's appalling You Can Have It, this Palmer-album's token dud track (at least it's just one this time; and there is a certain purpose-of-continuity to it) which sounds like R.P. taking the piss out of the straightness of the song. Like he's killing it, its rigidity, its formal falseness. It will probably be a massive, embarrassing hit.
Pride, the storyline of Pride, ends with the bullseye of What You Waiting For, well up the Johnny And Mary standards of proving that, unbelievably for this sure-fire charlaton, Robert Palmer is capable of neatly expressing emotion. His ultimate surprise (so far).
Pride is about fitting triangles into square slots. It is adventurous song-writing. The best thing about it, and Palmer, is that you know that at heart there is no masterplan, he has never read Nabokov, he is just that smoothie decently setting out to pen some pop music. And that's fitting and irrelevant.
Pride is desperately mad, slightly moving. If you think genuinely that Marillion are about "mystery" and "adventure", it will give you a heart attack.
Dave McCulllough (Sounds - April 1983)
Lire aussi :
- Pride Of Place (Sounds - 1983)