Wake Up 2010
On his 25th studio album it takes a matter of minutes for Paul Weller to slip into grumpy old codger mode. 'Get your face out the Facebook, and turn off the phone,' he grumbles, which rather suggests that, like Peter Kay's grandmother insisting on the existence of something called the 'tinternet', Paul Weller thinks Facebook comes with a definite article attached. 'What with the death of the postbox,' he adds, 'nowhere feels home.'
Fall 2010 / Wake Up Your Immune System; Wake Up Your Immune System. By Mary Shaffer. Published: September 1, 2010. Bounce the core of your body with a quick, slight up and down motion. Let the head and neck relax and you’ll feel the neck area jiggling. This short, quick bounce really works those glands in the neck and more subtly at the.
Taken out of context, the lyric seems to confirm your worst fears. Perhaps 2008's remarkable, turbulent, chaotic 22 Dreams was merely a temporary blip, a clearing of the avant-garde pipes before a return to what came before it, when his albums resembled the kind of TV dramas you get at 8pm on a Sunday – cosily undemanding, so predictable you could set your watch by them, riven with rose-tinted nostalgia for an oddly non-specific era of the past in which everything was supposedly better than it is now. You could see why it happened: with the Style Council, he nearly succeeded in wrong-footing himself out of a career, with all but the most ardent of fans manning the lifeboats around the time of the film JerUSAlem, which featured among its many knuckle-gnawing moments Weller as the Canute-like 'Paul Welly', loudly protesting the sea's effect on his genitals ('Go back! For my parts do freeze!'). Nevertheless, that didn't make the combination of grunty man-rock and reactionary sentiment that has been a staple of his solo career any more edifying.
But no: the complaint about 'the Facebook' is set to a backing so excitable it sounds less like a fiftysomething's grumble than a strident call to arms. If anything, Wake Up the Nation – 16 songs in under 40 minutes – ventures even further out than its predecessor. You can tell as much from the credits: there are guitars by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and vocals by the Woking Gay Community choir, the latter, alas, merely a pseudonym for Weller's daughter. The fearless try-anything spirit of Paul Welly, it seems, is still alive and well.
Wake Up 2010
At the height of his water-treading, Weller famously decried David Bowie's output as 'pish', which seemed to sum up the problem: a kind of trenchant, wilful dreariness, informed by the steadfast belief that anyone who wasn't set on boring everyone else to death simply wasn't doing things properly. You could find antecedents for Wake Up the Nation's spikier moments in the avant-garde end of the Jam's output – Pop Art Poem, Scrape Away, Music for the Last Couple – but it's most obviously in thrall to Bowie. Its zippy structure recalls side one of Low. Fast Car/Slow Traffic arrives decorated with piano that sounds remarkably like Mike Garson's free contributions to Aladdin Sane. Andromeda not only sounds like Bowie, it features a lyric in which Paul Weller mans a spaceship and flies away from earth, perhaps the least likely astronaut since the US blasted Enos the chimp into orbit on the Mercury Atlas 5.
Wake Up Documentary
Occasionally his usually sure hand on the songwriting slips and it sounds unfinished, as if he started experimenting, then stopped without actually reaching a conclusion. Nevertheless, that seems a small price to pay for having this many ideas flying past you at a breathless pace: funk decorated with autoharp; chaotic, sprawling guitar topped with Jerry Lee Lewis piano; a Dusty Springfieldish ballad augmented by woozy, off-kilter strings; an instrumental influenced by Broadcast. The track 7&3 Is the Strikers' Name sees Weller returning to politics, albeit of an even less considered and nuanced variety than in the Red Wedge era, when he was wont to write things like 'see how monetarism kills whole communities, even families'. Here, he explores how republicanism would advance the egalitarian cause of a meritocratic democracy thus: 'Them fuckers in the castles, they're all bastards, too.' This clearly isn't going to win the Johan Skytte prize in political science, but there's something about the gusto of it – not to mention the fathomless layers of feedback beneath it – that's hugely exciting.
The latter is also true of Trees, a five-part suite that flails wildly from piano ballad to psychedelia to electronica to hoary soul and features Weller singing: 'Once I was a man, my cock as hard as wood.' It looks ridiculous on paper, and, in fairness, sounds pretty ridiculous coming out of the speakers, but the sheer conviction with which it's performed carries you along despite yourself, wearing the astonished expression almost all of Wake Up the Nation provokes. As the title of one instrumental has it, Whatever Next?