Veteran singer-songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Paul Morricone unashamedly proclaims via Wikipedia that he spent his youth absorbing the disparate influences of The Stranglers and Tony Bennett. This is rather like his exact contemporary Crispian Mills’s amalgamation of late mod/Deep Purple leanings with Indian classical music.
Like the premier league singer-songwriters past and present, Paul is dining out on a parallel existence as a solo artist of late, alongside his years of performing on the indie circuit with The Scaramanga Six.
With his reverent game plan, Paul’s latest album Go Sanction Yourself – his third – contains elements of baroque pop evoking a young and beautiful, well-dressed non-hippy couple cruising down a European boulevard circa 1969.
That very year, Scott Walker removed himself from his harnessing Jacques Brel influences, to pen potent kitchen sink melodramas that eventually paved the way for the electronic influences that he would fleetingly experiment with in the following decade.
While the album will inevitably make any Walker fans sit up and take mental notes, there is a sense, on first listen, that this is a well thought out album that has its distinct mood festooned with krautrock and electronica. After all, no artiste is free of their influences. Take The Jam brilliantly aping the early Who, and ditto The Black Crowes with mid-career Rolling Stones. Just to name a couple amongst many. Reference points shift units, and ‘retro pastiches’ are usually easy to spot a mile off.
The opener ‘I’ve Got You In The Palm of My Hand‘ is suitably ambitious and auspicious. It begins in a heavy-handed but cinematic manner with Blue Nile LinnDrum-style insinuations and concludes in a ‘church bells’ fashion which is wholly soothing, albeit in a demented way.
It criticises the restrains of the ‘British mentality’, and the misanthropic free-form ‘People In My Way‘ occupies the same brittle territory. ‘Laughing At You‘ sounds like an outtake from Holger Czukay’s Movies with its back and forth omnipresent imagery. Not for the lyrically faint-hearted.
The uplifting ‘Goodnight ‘Jamie with’ its righteous Sonny Rollins-sounding sax played by Paul himself, is a definite precursor to the earthy ‘Peabody‘ which is the album’s stand-out number. It is the most ‘Scott’ track of the whole album: distinctly occupying the sexually suburban territory of Mrs Murphy and The Amorous Humphrey Plugg. The track’s instrumentality is reminiscent of ‘The War Is Over‘ from the here today/gone tomorrow 1970 album Until The Band Comes In. More Scott is sensed in ‘Pale Shadow‘ which has a reflective level of NYC folk singer intimacy. It begins with an interwoven guitar, evokes ‘If You Go Away‘ and is evocative of raindrops falling.
‘The Observer‘ expands the outsider theme, but is less ornate and more motorik and is juxtaposed like a Captain Beefheart or Pere Ubu track: contrasting off kilter instrumental pieces playing simultaneously. The fact that is reminiscent of Primal Scream’s Autobahn 66 gives it the required contemporary sheen. A sense of full circle, going from one musical extreme to another, hammers home with ‘Dining Out (On That Particular Buffet)‘. It is funky enough in the Bowie and early Golden Palominos sense, but nicely evolves into a caustic take of a certain early Bob Dylan track.
The only ‘below par’ detour in this consistently great album is ‘Are We Having A Moment‘. While it is wholly grandiose, it seems to flag with little sense of killing time and comes across like a twee singalong. That is the only nit-picking flaw on my part. The album’s generosity outweighs.
Taking into account that labels and genres are not so rigid as they were a few decades ago, Go Sanction Yourself has a well-produced sense of universal appeal, and will generate enough enthusiasm to explore its prime influences as well as Paul’s previous work A sense of poetic drama runs all the way through: a narrative by way of a multi-faceted aesthetic with superlatives in abundance.
Go Sanction Yourself is out now on Wrath Records.
