It’s hard to believe that 40 years have passed since Paul Weller first arrived on the scene with The Jam’s debut LP In The City. The precocious, angry frontman would go on to pen a number of timeless British anthems before his 21st birthday, built upon an unnerving social commentary of working class life.
Now four decades on, Weller has found himself confronting similar political upheaval in the UK. Instead of trudging up and down the nostalgia circuit, Weller is in the midst of a creative resurgence that began with 2008’s tangential 22 Dreams and shows little sign of abating.
A Kind Revolution is an album that pokes around the fringes, drawing a number of disparate influences through the Weller prism, from Motown soul to straight-out psychedelia. From the sci-fi glam rock of ‘Nova’, to the seductive shuffle of ‘She Moves With The Fayre’ and the heartfelt ballad ‘The Cranes Are Back’, Weller traverses soul, rock and jazz experimentations to create both cosmic soundscapes and, at times, genre-bending strangeness. Here he delivers the beautiful, rather than the agitated.
Angus Young once described his own music as being “like baking a cake – if you’ve got a really good recipe, you stick at it”. But as Weller illustrates, going against the grain can deliver something extraordinary too.
A Kind Revolution is out Friday May 12 through Parlophone/Warner.
