PAUL KELLY
Fever Longing Still (EMI)
SAYING PAUL KELLY HAS GONE back to first principles with his 29th album may be perplexing. There is a generation that doesn’t know and another that may not remember that restlessness was not always his state of being. That wondering what direction has the Melbourne-based songwriter gone now was not a thought that occurred on the eve of each album release.
Until the late ‘90s, backed by a traditionally-shaped band (The Dots, The Coloured Girls and The Messengers), he had for two decades worked steadily and to increasing sales with songs built for live performance around melodic hooks and foursquare beats, guitars to the front and storytelling and locale at the centre of the lyrics. He was good at it too. Maybe too comfortably good for his own sake.
But a bluegrass album and a dub project in 1999, accompanied by a cross-fertilising combination with his young nephew, Dan, found Kelly rejuvenated and suddenly restless. This century has seen soul records, a collaborative album inspired by bird-themed poems, another bluegrass set, a bluesy duo and an album of Shakespeare sonnets set to music. His last three albums were songs (mostly covers) he had been playing during lockdown, a reinterpretation, with local jazzhead Paul Grabowsky of nine of his older songs, and a Christmas-themed collection that drew on myriad cultures, rhythms and writers (and of course his own How To Make Gravy, now a seasonal standard).
It’s likely the last thing anyone expected in 2024 was a band-focused, pop rock/country rock record that jangled and bustled as much is it sighed and cried, structured in the style of a pre-streaming/pre-CD, two-sided vinyl, and feeling like an album that might have come out in the early ‘90s. But that’s where we are, and Kelly comes with a bunch of familiars.
There’s Bill McDonald on bass and Peter Luscombe on drums, Dan Kelly and Ash Naylor on guitar, Cameron Bruce on keyboards, and occasionally, Vika and Linda Bull on backing vocals: some of whom go back more than 30 years with him, and all of whom know how to make a room of musicians feel like a band. A band that can turn its hand to anything, and quickly too – something Kelly helpfully signposts for us by leaving in his voice giving key and tempo guidance at the beginning of the recorded-on-its-first-take Houndstooth Dress.
The band close in behind the piano in Double Business Bound, wearied just enough to evoke country dust blowing through, and sneak up to night-bar soul in Love Has Made A Fool Of Me; they ride the clip clop rhythm of Harpoon To The Heart from the back paddock to the riverbank, and tumble through the pub’s back door into a brassy soul show in Hello Melancholy, Hello Joy. And Taught By Experts sets chiming guitars to a Messengers-style momentum that playfully contradicts its lyrics of revenge with its sound of joy.
Old school band doing old school variety with old school energy. It worked then; it works now.
First principles doesn’t just apply to the music though, as Kelly builds these songs around the classic four Ds: desire, devotion, disappointment, death. You know, the way God, Elvis, Townes Van Zandt and Shakespeare intended.
The most prominent of these is desire, a seam of sensuality running from the cover of a close-quarters hindquarters image of a curved body sheathed tightly. Opening track, Houndstooth Dress, is positively horny (“Slip it on, I’ll zip it up before we go … That dress sticks to you like a judge sticks to the law”) and Let’s Work It Out In Bed, which opens “side two” with a similar hip-grind rhythm and the vocals of Reb Fountain, looks to sex to make up for the harm being done with words.
Even the incipient melancholy that hovers around the cross-border romance in Northern Rivers, runs on a faint seam of physical wonder and appreciation.
But desire doesn’t last, or eventually maybe it doesn’t matter. Not like the family photos and memories in the shuffling blues All Those Smiling Faces, the warmth in the languid flow of Going To The River With Dad, or the wistful country soul questioning of Back To The Future, three songs which in one way or another argue for the value of moments in a life of impermanence.
“Ooh, get on the floor and dance!/You don’t have forever,” Kelly says. After all, as he himself shows, nothing stays the same. Though it may come around again.
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A version of this review was first published by The Guardian.
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