Where It’s At Is Where You Are 2024
In There Like Swimwear
Glaswegian polymath plumbs the depths of all seasons through summery grooves and chilling tunes.
Hurrying things up has never been Paul Kelly’s forte, what with the Scottish artist’s strength lying in his ability to perfectly capture a moment right after it’s come to pass. There’s no surprise, then, in this album’s emergence only as a second full-length entry in the discography of the veteran’s project that spans almost two decades strewn with a few four- and five-track offerings. The last of those was 2021’s "Getting Stranger By The Month" which appeared during the pandemic, but three years later the colors of Kelly’s song seem undimmed enough as to sting, if not stun, the listener on both melodic and lyrical levels, as the guidelines of psychedelic pop, Paul’s specialty, dictate. Here’s the dictate one would better obey – in order to have a good time and embrace optimism on a “carpe diem” principle.
One doesn’t have to wait for the finale, a prog-tinctured mini-epic bearing the deceptively unimaginative, yet in fact extremely funny, title “Closing Number” and holding a major part of the platter’s grandeur, to feel blessed, or even blissed-out. There’s no need, because opener “Hold On Full Of Hope” brings forth, together with Kelly’s boyish voice, a life-affirming assault of boisterous instrumentation and sees his ivories drive this number towards a sweet boogie-tinctured refrain before slowing it down to the swaggering blues and segueing into “Empty Out Here” where acoustic strum and cosmic synthesizers conspire to sculpt a futuristic trip beyond the pale. The pastiche approach may reach the ultimate playfulness on the scintillating “No Victory” which advances false innocence through multilayered arrangement and vocal polyphony, but the pseudo orchestral “Something In The Water” goes for more serious, soul-exploring sentiments, while “Exploding Crushing Inevitable” and “Not Coming Down” land on a dancefloor for an euphoric rave, and “Working On My Eyes” blends disco with rock ‘n’ roll via a muscular bass line.
However, all this stylistic variety is what makes “In There Like Swimwear” so profound and alluring – like a swimwear on a well-toned body, indeed.
*****
