Procol HarumBeyond
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The Team Rock review • Terry Staunton, online here
Psych-pop pioneers make a long overdue but welcome return
To the broadest of demographics, Gary Brooker’s name is umbilically attached to
one particular song. So much so that when the time comes, the laziest and least
conscientious obituaries will be headlined 'Whiter Shade Of Pale Man
Dies’.
In a 2009 BBC survey, that single, Procol Harum’s début hit and a worldwide No1,
topped yet another chart: the most played single of the previous 75 years. At
the time, it had been six years since the band’s last album, a recording hiatus
that’s only coming to an end now with Novum.
Brooker has nonetheless kept busy touring with a relatively settled line-up,
including elaborate shows with orchestral accompaniment (later released on DVD)
and overseeing the remastering of Procol Harum’s back catalogue.
Despite what could be interpreted as a highfalutin title (novum is a word
coined by Croatian writer and academic Darko Suvin to describe scientifically
plausible innovations used in science fiction), this set of eleven new songs is
decidedly less prog, psych or symphonic than what might be regarded as the
group’s signature material.
As inventive and exploratory as their back pages were, it’s somehow sensible and
reassuring to hear the band leaving Pandora’s Box unopened and deciding
not to take A Salty Dog for another walk. Brooker is 72 this year, and
his subject matter is age-appropriate but pleasingly free of fuddy-duddy
autumnal wheezing. The love-gone-bad despatch I Told On You is a
mid-paced bluesy rocker in a Joe Cocker vein (‘I knew you were plotting for your
takeover / The notes you were jotting on the way from Dover’), and fairly
typical of former Cream collaborator Pete Brown’s lyrics throughout. Unrequited
love for a best friend’s wife drives the country hues of Last Chance Motel,
and similar frowned upon emotions rear their head in the ballad Don’t Get
Caught.
Motifs of the past echo loudest on the string-led baroque tropes of Sunday
Morning, but for the most part, Novum offers straight-down-the-line
AOR of a consistently high quality. The lightness of touch and ready wit are
especially evident on Neighbour, a jaunty accordion underpinning a bitchy
paean to the bloke down the street with a better life (‘No matter how much I try
to catch him up / He always seems to have a fuller cup’).
At the heart of the album is Brooker’s dextrous keyboard work, his pristine
piano-playing embellished in all the right places by Josh Phillips’s Hammond
organ. What’s equally impressive is the might of Brooker’s voice, which has lost
none of its vigour in the fifty years since he first skipped the light fandango.
About the album | Get Novum: Amazon UK / Amazon USA | |
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