#Fat pop paul weller review mod#

Seemingly some good has come from 2020’s lockdown, Weller decided to keep working on new material rather than let his waistline expand, he’s enlarged his catalogue of lauded material with this latest effort. This new album is far from a stinker, The Modfather is on some sort of tremendous musical escapade that’s seen him create alluring, impassioned, buoyant and cheerful music without bowing down to become an informal figure of the industry, far from it, Weller excites and compels time and time again with each release, Fat Pop continuing on from where 2020’s excellent On Sunset left off. Maybe some want him to release a dodgy long player but as Weller has triumphantly echoed time and time again, his fire never goes out and it is such chorusing chimes that reverberate with this latest release. Fat Pop (Volume 1) sparks with neural stimulation you can almost see, like swinging the doors wide at dawn.With the eagerly anticipated release of his 16 th solo album entitled Fat Pop (Volume 1), released via Polydor records on May 14 th, it’s about time Paul Weller released a stinker, an album that could devise opinion in his audience such as when This Is The Modern World, The Orange Album or even Confessions Of A Pop Group were released, causing rifts between his followers who were not quite on the same wave length as the Woking Wonder. Philly soul strings materialise as the song both sharpens and expands, becoming kaleidoscopic, with a sense of travel and Euro-romance, a jet-set propulsion into adventure, that’s been hard to find lately. “I thought I lost you for a while,” “Glad Times” then worries, before drifting into a Seventies haze.

“True”, a duet with Lia Metcalfe from Liverpool’s The Mysterines, is a breezy strut, with ringing glam guitar. “Fat Pop” focuses on music’s literally life-saving properties, Weller riding his own bass groove and adopting a deadpan voice recalling Ian Dury to enquire: “Who hangs your dreams up every night?/.Who’s been a friend when you really needed one?” “In Better Time” shows similar paternal concern, softly soaring into a chorus holding out hope to an imagined, lost young listener. “Is there not a moment you can cite?” he nudges. “Larks ascending,” Weller sings at the start of the sunny bustle of “Shades of Blue”, while “Cobweb Connection” beckons us down whichever back-road or riverside we find meaningful, those havens where happy memories lodge, curing despair. The pandemic this was made in is addressed by resisting and even rejecting it, with a crisp, spring hopefulness suiting the hopeful rebirth it’s released into. Each track sounds modern and distinct, with shape, space and edge, alighting on most of Weller’s modes. Productively sober since 2010, he’s looking sharp in every sense, alert and precise, and turning his Black Barn studio into a pop artisan’s workshop, producing crafted English pop almost round the clock.įat Pop (Volume 1) is his second album in a year, productivity which went out with The Beatles and the Stones, and its two- and three-minute songs also restore a lost art of concision second-nature during the pop single’s Sixties peak.

#Fat pop paul weller review mod#

The alias fits these days, though, as the man who pulled the plug on The Jam with a brace of Surrey soul anthems then blew up The Style Council with a house album again exemplifies the Mod aesthetic.