Paul Weller suits being a grumpy old man – the week’s best albums
Paul Weller: 66 ★★★★☆
The year 1976 was when a teenage Paul Weller started making waves with fierce punk combo The Jam. But 1966 probably remains the seminal year in Weller’s musical psyche, when his eight-year-old self was absorbing British rock’s expansion into psychedelia with the Beatles, The Who and Small Faces, whilst America poured out soulful shades of urban black pop to empower the UK’s stylish mod scene.
Weller turned 66 on Saturday, the young tyro having long since ascended to grandee status in British rock culture, known affectionately as the Modfather. He shares a vocational ethos with such other hardworking veterans as Van Morrison and Robert Plant, a drive to keep making new music for its own reward – and too bad for anyone who just wants to hear the hits.
The number 66 is the name of Weller’s 16th solo album (subsequent to six with The Jam and five with the Style Council), decorated with a handsome numerical cover by the great British pop artist Peter Blake (who designed the Beatles’ 1967 masterpiece Sgt Pepper as well as Weller’s 1995 solo bestseller, Stanley Road). A sense of history runs deep in the grooves of the only original punk icon to admit loving the Beatles.
It’s fair to say there is nothing groundbreaking on offer, just another set of beautifully constructed and performed songs of soul and meaning, drawing on all the above influences with a strand of bucolic English folk (Traffic, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake) that have been a part of Weller’s oeuvre since 1993’s Wild Wood.
The odd departure is that, for the first time, Weller has collaborated on almost every track, composing music to lyrics written by friends including Suggs of Madness (the jauntily philosophical Ship of Fools and jazzily romantic Nothing), Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream (psychedelic spiritual rocker Soul Wandering), Dr Robert of the Blow Monkeys (orchestral easy listening soul anthem Rise Up Singing) and Noel Gallagher (Britpop belter Jumble Queen, which has a horn section to get any vintage rock fan punching the air in delight). The fact that all these offerings sound indistinguishable from Weller’s own elegant lyrical style – seeking understated poetry in ordinary life – is indicative of what an influence he has been on his peers.
But has the voice of a generation run out of things to say? Two solo compositions hint at dissatisfactions. Lonely acoustic folk ballad I Woke Up depicts Weller as the last man standing in a world bereft of meaning. Album highlight Flying Fish is an expansive rock meets disco song in which Weller’s metaphorical fish are helplessly trapped in the (inter)net. The thrill here is the way chords and groove open out as Weller exalts in the power of music to raise our spirits and perspective, but I get the impression he is not a fan of new digital distribution platforms: “Stream the sh-t out of a dream / Caught up in the threads / Of plots we’ll soon forget.”
The trajectory from angry young man to grumpy old one is all too familiar, and there can be something a bit luddite in Weller’s fixation on nostalgic formats. Personally, I wish he would dial down the glockenspiels and flutes, but that might just be a matter of taste. He’s been a hero to many for almost 50 years now, and at 66 still sounds like music means everything to him. Neil McCormick
Vince Staples, Dark Times ★★★★☆
It’s shaping up to be Vince Staples’s year. The Californian rapper rose to the top of Netflix’s streaming chart in February with his surreal, semi-autobiographical series, The Vince Staples Show. Centred on a succession of hilarious scenarios in the 30-year-old’s native Long Beach, it offered further insight into a rapper who has long since eschewed the petty beefs and grievances of the scene (earlier this month, he weighed in on the viral war of words between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, saying he thought “we deserve better than that”) in favour of genre-bending sounds.
It’s been just over a decade since Staples released Stolen Youth, his first collaborative mixtape with the late, great rapper Mac Miller (who died, aged 26, in 2018). Staples’s long-standing association with Odd Future, the Californian alt-hip hop collective that made stars of Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator, catapulted him into the scene, resulting in hits like Blue Suede and Norf.
Now, Staples has followed up 2022’s critically acclaimed Ramona Park Broke My Heart (one of the best albums about the growing pangs of urban adolescence I’ve ever heard) with Dark Times, a remarkable eighth musical offering filled with dense, introspective lyricism and erratic beats. A confidently succinct collection of 10 songs erupt with passion and power: Black&Blue reflects on the difficult circumstances – rampant poverty, institutional racism – that resign Black Americans to a life of struggle (“My people product of poverty, I don’t know why they would play with us… Learned Reaganomics and ran it up, we ain’t got nothing to show for it”), while Freeman and Shame on the Devil swap Staples’s long-standing techno-tinged backing tracks for dark, thrashing riffs more reminiscent of Portishead or Korn than classic West Coast rap.
Dark Times undoubtedly makes for more challenging listening than Ramona…, but for listeners willing to put in the time and effort, prepare to be rewarded. Staples is a supremely self-assured rapper uninterested in following trends or being confined by genre; and as his excellent recent foray into TV proved, his reach is only going to get larger. Poppie Platt
Best new Songs
By Poppie Platt
Hard-Fi, Don’t Go Making Plans
The English electro-rock band return with their first new track in 10 years, and it’s a scorcher: groovy beats masking the depth in frontman Richard Archer’s lyrics as he deplores the government’s recent attempts to curb protest freedoms with their Public Order Act.
Romy Mars, Stuck Up
Having won over the internet with funny TikTok videos and glamorous appearances on the Cannes red carpet with her grandfather, Francis Ford Coppola, the daughter of Sofia Coppola and Phoenix’s Thomas Mars takes her cue from her Grammy-winning father and kicks off her pop career with a ballad about young love.
The National, Heaven
Taken from the excellent Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (a cover album which also features Miley Cyrus, Paramore and Lorde), the Ohio band place their slow, achingly melancholy spin on Talking Heads’ classic.
Zach Bryan, Pink Skies (Eulogy)
The most talented current songwriter in country - Bruce Springsteen is a fan, and recently came on stage with Bryan to sing his hit Revival - returns with a song about how painful it can be to move on, or move away, from your roots.
