Then it's right back to jazz instrumental tracks like nothing happened, the first of which has this really fun Latin groove to it while the second is a super laid back club tune. But then, The Whole Point Of No Return subverts every expectation I had with this really soft, yet powerful guitar ballad about how the rich control everything. Like when the first track starts, you think you're in store for this really soulful jazz instrumental album with these really punchy piano playing with a tambourine accompaniment. Today's Album: "Café Bleu" by The Style Council - This album really didn't seem like it was going to blow me away from the front cover and name, but wow this is seriously one of the most compelling albums I've listened to on this generator so far. So if you read this, I might unintentionally heighten your expectations, possibly leading to a sizeable disappointment. Now, I said I came into this album with slightly diminished expectations, allowing the album to surprise me with its high quality. However, songs like The Paris Match (sung by Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl) have moments of real beauty, Strength of Your Nature possesses a fierce pulse, and the rap of A Gospel, remarkably, doesn't embarrass Weller nor the listener, a frankly miraculous turn of events when one contemplates the Wham! Rap and a thousand other sorry stabs at hip-hop by white singers. The album has 5(!) instrumentals, but neither their smoothness nor their jazziness grates. And Weller makes a decent enough fist of this more soulful style for Café Bleu to work. The discerning listener may note that Mick Talbot was formerly the keyboardist for Dexy's Midnight Runners, the great soul champions of British new wave, so The Style Council were not going into these exotic genres that blindly. Paul Weller, giving his reasoning for this iconoclasm against The Jam's kinda thing, pointed out that the kids today in the mid-80s were grooving on down to soul, disco, R&B and other genres rooted in black music, so he and his new bandmate Mick Talbot might find exploring such music rewarding. In any case, the sophisti-pop, 80s blue-eyed soul, jazzy instrumentals and (gulp) raps each seem, at first glance, a threat rather than an experiment.īut ride me sideways, I rather like it. This attitude, by my understanding, is pretty common across the UK: The Jam get praised as a key part of the British canon, and The Style Council get dismissed as a peculiarity by a iconic songwriter fleeing from his previous image. However, The Style Council never got chosen the only mate of ours who listened to The Style Council did so as an act of genuflection to his hero Paull Weller. 2000, The Jam were, like The Clash and The Kinks, part of my heritage when my mates and I made mixtapes for the car in order to impress each other, a Jam track usually found its way onto our exacting compilations. The payoff of diminished expectations, eh? As a British indie kid ca.
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