This week I’ll post mini-reviews of five albums I’ve bought in recent weeks. Overall this has been a very solid year for new music. My top ten is populated with albums I’ve already returned to again and again, albums that cover a wide variety of styles and genres.
It’s also split evenly between male and female artists, a nice bit of symmetry that I don’t see very often on my year-end list.
Paul Simon’s Graceland is famous for its blend of Simon’s signature pop sensibility with the sounds of South African music, including the a capella work of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Simon was accused of supporting apartheid by breaking a cultural embargo but the United Nations supported him.
The South African influence is certainly heard all over Graceland, but it’s easy to forget that Simon spins off in other directions, particularly at the end of the album.
Paul Simon’s Graceland is an all-time classic, his best work, a critical and commercial smash, one of the most beloved albums in history. It feels almost unnecessary to write about it because its story is so well-known, its rhythms and melodies long ago memorized.
What struck me as I reached this album in the chronology of my Paul Simon Weekends is that Graceland arrived at the lowest point in Simon’s career.
I used the word “dud” yesterday to describe Bruce Springsteen’s Lucky Town and that was probably unfair. It is generally lumped together with Human Touch — understandably, as they were released simultaneously — but it is widely considered the stronger record.
Springsteen had nearly completed Human Touch and he set out to write one more song. Instead he came up with ten, and decided to release them as a separate album. I haven’t heard either of the albums but everything I’ve read suggests that this one is the keeper.
In 1992, after an eight-album winning streak the likes of which American rock music had never encountered, Bruce Springsteen put out his first dud. His first two duds, actually, as his follow-up to Tunnel of Love took the form of two distinct albums released on the same day.
The more popular of the two was Human Touch, though most reviews suggest it is also the weaker effort. The record finds Springsteen in a much lighter mood than on the somber Tunnel of Love. Five years after the divorce album he had settled down with Patti Scialfa and set out to prove the theory that misery makes for much better music.
