 |
| |
|
| |
Album Review
by SaschaS
19-4-2002
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
More on: Swing Out Sister
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
| Swing Out Sister's 'Somewhere...' |
|
Swing Out Sister: 'Somewhere Deep In The Night'
(Liberty)
Swing Out Sister’s ‘Somewhere Deep In The Night’ is the most stylish disc you’ll hear this year
Does anything truly exist if not advertised? Let’s take the case of Swing Out Sister: the band had its last Brit-hit almost a decade ago, when ‘Nothinggonnachange’ just sneaked inside the Top 50; their greatest hit, No. 4, had been the debut, ‘Breakdown’, in 1987. Then, an apparent silence although they never stopped working and ‘Somewhere Deep In The Night’ finds them at the pinnacle of their creative powers. Not that you’d know if your information came via commercials…
‘Somewhere Deep In The Night’ is a collection of songs delivered with such midnight passion that cause improper thoughts at any time; it is that sexy, erotic, hormone awakening. This music simply flows like the life’s juices, it is gorgeous, captivating, it’s bed inviting… Rising from the emotional emptiness (like mirroring the opening of stage-curtain), ‘Through The Sky’ is an orchestral event of a grand pop magnitude with jazz-smoked vocal that makes you re-examine your feelings, once again.
Swing Out Sister trade in elegant, chic, romanticism-flavoured music that soars way above the pop horizon with its French soundtrack-like arrangements, its complex tempo changes that recall the prime American musicals, it swings with blue moves, it burns (quietly) with red-hot desire… Imagine being in the best relationship with your ideal woman living a life you’ve designed… (Slacker-heaven, of course.)
There are starker pieces, more 1960s pop-ballads such as ‘Will We Find Love?’ and ‘What Kind Of Fool Are You?’, the pace picks up on the title track, ‘Fool Tag’, it gets dreamier and more hypnotic on ‘The Vital Thing’ (or the ‘Take B’ with a spine-grabbing saxophone), the spoken vocal (in French) of ‘Suspended In Time’ simply evokes images of Catherine Deneuve in ‘Belle Du Jour’… As the final songs demands, ‘Now Listen To Me’…
Corrine Drewery commands attention from a vocal position that is understatedly mighty to enrol one into The Fellowship Of The Ring of emotions before you can read all the 14 titles. Music that doesn’t crowd itself upon senses but invites you in, into a magical world of the sounds from an enchanted jardin… I don’t buy cut-flowers (so un-Zen) but am strongly motivated…
“Everything’s been said and done,” Drewery sings in ‘Through The Sky’, but these are pastiches of such compelling kind that actually sound refreshed and invigorated. A disc for all the after-hours humans… Everyone should own a copy, and that’s an order, Ensign!
SaschaS
19-4-2002
Swing Out Sister’s album ‘Somewhere Deep In The Night’ is available now on Liberty/EMI
|
|
|
