Music Review: Paul Weller, “22 Dreams” (Yep Roc)
Rating: 91
Longtime fans had every reason to believe that Paul Weller had shuffled off into a permanently fallow late career, recording inconsequential “dad rock” that paled compared to his monumental work with his great ‘70s mod band, The Jam. But much like his song from 1995’s “Stanley Road,” Weller is the “Changingman,” having gone from mod punk to cocktail jazz-pop with his Style Council to rustic, Traffic-style classic forms as a solo artist. Now, with the wildly experimental “22 Dreams,” the Changingman has changed yet again.
To hear “22 Dreams” is to truly behold Weller’s ever-changing moods. “Light Nights” opens the album with the drone of minor-key Celtic folk, with Weller inviting us in a light brogue, “come out to play, now that the light nights are here.” But then Weller zigs from that zag on the title song, a hard-charging R&B rave-up, and continues the heavy soul on the string-laden “Have You Made Up Your Mind?” He also turns in his most impassioned rock song in years on the first single, “Echoes Around the Sun,” a swirling psych-rock collaboration with Noel Gallagher. It is a song with no real precedent in Weller’s 30-year career.
But then “22 Dreams” gets brilliantly strange, as on the simmering tango “One Bright Star,” the unsettling spoken word piece “God” and the freaktronica instrumental “111.” These are 100 yards outside Weller’s wheelhouse and he seems to know it, but then the weird new Paul and the “Cappuccino Kid” from the Style Council mesh on the dreamily magnificent “Empty Ring,” which comes on like a trippy ‘70s soul ballad pulled from an outer space signal. It is all a deeply appreciated surprise: on “22 Dreams,” the newly hungry, energized “Modfather” sounds like a boy wonder again.
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Comments
Working backward after “22 Dreams,” I’d start with:
“Illumination” (2002) — This was the album that, more than anything else, points to where he is today: Weller started using loops and samples here to augment the sort of earthy rock style he’d inhabited since “Wild Wood.” The best track, without question, is “It’s Written in the Stars,” the best neo-soul song he had written since the Style Council’s “The Lodgers” and until “Empty Ring” from the new one, which actually sounds like its backing comes from an Avalanches track from “Since I Left You.”
“Heliocentric” (2000) An expansive pop album in the best sense, mostly filled with easy-going, soulful folk and mature pop such as “Picking Up Sticks,” easily in my top 10 of his solo songs.
“Stanley Road” (1995) A bit of a stylistic sequel to “Wild Wood,” but it has several indispensable songs, including “Changingman,” the majestically slow-burning “You Do Something To Me” and his great cover of Dr. John’s “I Walk on Gilded Splinters,” which played in the wholly devastating final scenes of the season four finale of “The Wire.”
“Wild Wood” (1993) His second rebirth, and a masterpiece at that. Weller created an album of impassioned folk-rock that no one expected from the man who had spent a decade doing faux-soul and cocktail jazz with the Style Council. He had done one solo album the year before that hinted at real revival, but “Wildwood” was something else entirely, a timeless album that had one foot in the rustic, folk-and-jazz tinged work of Traffic and the Brit-pop that he helped kickstart just as Oasis were preparing their debut. Starting with “Sunflower” and continuing on with the title track, “Has My Fire Really Gone Out?” and “All the Pictures On the Wall,” it’s really just flawless when no one was expecting it.
The Style Council — Get “Introducing the Style Council,” “Cafe Bleu” and “Our Favorite Shop” if you have an appreciation for British R&B, Parisian-style new wave and cocktail jazz with a slight socialist bent. Everything after 1985 until his solo career began in the early ’90s was either bland or outright atrocious — seriously.
The Jam — You cannot go wrong with any of their discs, and you shouldn’t. “In the City,” “This is the Modern World,” “All Mod Cons,” “Setting Sons,” “Sound Affects,” and their 1982 swan song, “The Gift.” Most hardcore Jam fans don’t like “The Gift” as much, because it was venturing into the R&B that marked the best Style Council work, such as their big hit, “A Town Called Malice,” but be a completist when it comes to The Jam.
So if one were to explore the Weller solo catalog starting with this one and going backwards, what albums would you recommend I check out first?