MUSIC ZONE
Paul Simon — So Beautiful or So What (Hear Music)
Saurabh & Gaurav

With more than two years in the making, So Beautiful or So What steeps in Afropop and American folk forms climbing some of the most resplendent summits of Simon’s career, rank as his most consistent solo effort since Rhythm of the Saints from 1990. The album does not have a dominant musical style. The sound is a kaleidoscope that moves from tender Graceland guitar to South Asian grooves on tablas to gentle ballads that incorporate harps, to outright rockers that are flavoured with bluegrass. The album sets a rollicking tone immediately at the start, with Simon’s chirpy, energetic vocals and stomping rhythms. Love and Hard Times is a complex tone poem, a beautifully orchestrated long-form melody that wanders sensuously. Dazzling Blue mashes together Indian music with bluegrass fiddle as Simon sings about a marriage that surpasses trouble. In the rousing Getting Ready for Christmas Day, Simon uses part of a sermon from the Rev. J.M. Gates, one of the most recorded preachers of the early 20th century, with his own lyrics about a kid in Iraq back for a third tour of duty. Questions For The Angels has a more spiritual bent but even, then, Simon is planted firmly in reality: many of these songs address either personal or broader societal woes. Likewise, Love is Eternal Sacred Light is smartly written amid a punchy kick drum and rocking rhythm combo, artfully constructed lyrics propel it to towards a greater wisdom.

Best track: Getting Ready for Christmas Day

Worst track: Amulet

Nine Types of Light finds the band enduring the journey started on their previous offering but it would be incorrect to suggest that more of the same is on offer. The pace is slower and more considered and there’s a greater sense of lyrical introspection than of yore. David Bowie once expressed admiration for the band with his guest appearance on 2006’s Return to Cookie Mountain, but it’s with Nine Types that they’ve taken their longest step toward highlighting the influence of Bowie’s late 1970s/early 1980s work and weaving it into a current context. The opening triptych of Second Song, Keep Your Heart and You move into the territory of affairs of the heart and love. Tracks like Keep Your Heart dare to keep quiet; pitched at a very long six minutes, it wanders from one looped element to another, fiddling with all types of sounds on the way to a forcefully flat climax. The album’s biggest strength is the way it mellows out TV on the Radio’s sound without sacrificing any of the intensity. Killer Crane is a slow-paced psychedelic trip, with a soft bassline, mellotron and sitar combining to create a soothing sound. Forgotten is the album’s only completely downtrodden track, a bass-heavy, minimalist, electronic description of a destroyed Beverly Hills. The band does loosen up here and there, particularly with the febrile No Future Shock and on the closing Caffeinated Consciousness, a lively, pounding nod to Pixies’ U-Mass.

Best track: Keep Your Heart

Worst track: New Cannonball Run

Like the Fleet Foxes’ debut LP and EP before it, Helplessness Blues is a meticulously arranged collection inclined somewhere between The Beach Boys’ waves of harmony and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s garage jams. At times, singer Robin Pecknold’s voice takes an aggressive tone, as on the eight-minute breakup saga The Shrine/An Argument; other times, it cracks slightly, exposing his pain on the bittersweet Lorelai. The image of Fleet Foxes has always been that of mountain men — outcasts stuck in a woodland cabin, seemingly transported here from centuries ago. Pecknold’s lyrics make no attempt to modernise; The dreamlike beginning of Montezuma, with its tender, subdued melody and delicate vocals, is a gentle reintroduction into the world of Fleet Foxes and their ethereal, endless summer vibes. On the album closer, Grown Ocean, Pecknold acknowledges that he is on a journey that he trusts will lead to enlightenment, with the lines, "I know someday the smoke will all burn off / All these voices I’ll someday have turned off / I will see you someday when I’ve woken / I’ll be so happy just to have spoken / I’ll have so much to tell you about it / In that dream I could hardly contain it/All my life I will wait to attain it."

Best track: Montezuma

Worst track: Blue Spotted Tail