Paul Kelly - Ways & Means
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CD Details
Artist: Paul KellyEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2004-02-24
Music Label: Cooking Vinyl
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Gunnamatta
- The Oldest Story In The Book
- Heavy Thing
- Won't You Come Around
- These Are The Days
- Beautiful Feeling
- Crying Shame
- Sure Got Me
- To Be Good Takes A Long Time
- Can't Help You Now
- Nothing But A Dream
- Little Bit O'Sugar
- Forty Eight Angels
- Your Lovin' Is On My Mind
- You Broke A Beautiful Thing
- My Way Is To You
- Curly Red
- King Of Fools
- Young Lovers
- Big Fine Girl
- Let's Fall Again
Music reviews of Ways & Means
Music Review: Beautiful and Haunting Album for Adults
Rating: 5 Stars
The samples available for this album are a good taster of the beautiful guitar work and lyrical content by a unique Australian musician.
Anyone who knows life in country towns will instantly recognise the mood set by the opening track "Gunnamatta" - at once laconic and sparse with deep undercurrents of violence waiting to erupt from the boredom. This piece perfectly caputures life in country towns where racial tension, boredom, substance and physical abuse create a potent mix. Here the band nails it perfectly.
What is so magical about this album compared to Kelly's other works is the band he has managed to pull together. The guitar work by Dan Luscombe, Dan Kelly and Graham Lee creates shifting moods, broad cinematic soundscapes and simple workmanlike progressions when required.
Often in pop music one finds that lyrics and music have little connection with each other. I'd go so far as to say that this is a fundamental problem with most pop music.
Here however, Kelly and his band bring together the two components and the result is more than the sum of its parts. In "Little Bit 'O Sugar" for example, the song is built around a warm, broad slide guitar, slightly unhinged in its chord progressions and inconclusive. Here, Kelly uses simple repetition of lyrics around the idea of wanting some "sugar" but the musicians take centre stage to build the piece into a blistering, slow burning torch song. That Kelly gives the band a purely instrumental track as the opening track is testament to the importance they play as the tracks unfold.
On songs where the lyrics take prominence such as "Beautiful Feeling", the guitar work remains simple and sparse, but never derivative. Lyrically, Kelly is exploring many of typical modern contradictions of love and desire. In "My way is to You" he sings:
...
Many times I've stumbled
Many times I've fallen down
But always I had
The dream of your dear ground
My way is, my way is to you.
...
The love in these songs is gravitational, elliptical and earthly foundation. What takes them even further is the aural canvas created by the musicians accompanying Kelly's vocals.
Here then is an album of slow burning love and lust songs for adults. Not just a great Australian album, but a great album, period.
More Ways & Means free music reviews:
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1
Description of Ways & Means
(Bonus Disc contains 10 new songs) Some of us who should know better pronounce "love songs" with a silent "silly" - as if there were a higher kind. Paul Kelly?s new collection, Ways and Means, containing nineteen unruly examples of the species (plus two breezy instrumentals), shows the prejudice for what it is. His new songs roil and seethe with feeling, wondering at their own abandon and delighting in the ride. ?Beautiful Feeling? unfolds like a flower, shy stirrings blooming to proud radiance. ?48 Angels? begins as awestruck adoration and loses itself in rapture. Elsewhere, loss of self is an explicit aim: in ?Won?t You Come Around?, the singer anxiously assures his lover: "only you can make this brain shut down". This vision of oblivious bliss isn?t wholly rose-tinted., ?To Be Good? may be raucous and cavalier, with barrelhouse piano, but it?s also haunted: by the ghost of Hank Williams and a persistent vision of sin. Having toured for most of 2002, Kelly decided, as he puts it, "to throw the balls up in the air again": to assemble a new set of accompanists. The new combination -- slide guitar, backing falsetto, "dweeby keyboard lines," and a Curtis Mayfield/Stones 70?s vibe -- clicked. The album was recorded without fuss in Melbourne last winter, with producer Tchad Blake cocking an ear for the performance that was ragged but right. They?re fresh and resilient and full of love. Produced by Tchad Blake & Paul KellyPaul Kelly - Lead Vocal and Acoustic Guitar Peter Luscombe - Drums & Percussion Bill McDonald ? Bass Dan Luscombe - Electric Guitar, Slide and Keyboards Dan Kelly - Electric Guitar, Banjo and Fiddle Graeme Lee ? Pedal Steel on Forty Eight Angels, Beautiful Feeling and Little Bit O? Sugar Bruce Haymes ? Piano on To Be Good Takes A Long Time
Kelly is an Australian singer-songwriter much loved in his homeland, but distressingly underappreciated everywhere else. Because he focuses on working-class life, he's sometimes compared to Bruce Springsteen, but really his best albums are closer to the unassuming art of British film director Mike Leigh. Kelly hit what appeared to be his creative peak in the late '80s and early '90s, most notably on Gossip and Under the Sun. What followed was a string of releases that included great songs but as much (or more) filler.
Thankfully, the two-disc Ways & Means is Kelly's most consistently satisfying disc in at least a decade. Book-ended by two Melbourne surf instrumentals, its 21 songs capture love in its many splendid and splintered forms. Kelly's lyrical gifts are sharp as ever, whether he's detailing a three-sided romance as it morphs over decades ("The Oldest Story in the Book"), praising the carnal delights of "Curly Red," or describing the thrall of romantic rapture ("Forty Eight Angels"). Credit is also due to Kelly's best band in a long time (in particular the twin guitar attack of Dan Luscombe and Dan Kelly), as well as the just-polished-enough production of Tchad Blake. Very smart and very adult, Ways & Means doesn't fit the template for a big 21st century hit, but it deserves a far wider audience that it's likely to find. --Keith Moerer
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