Album reviews: Paul Simon faces up to his mortality on impressive Seven Psalms
Paul Simon pictured in 2021. (Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP)
- Paul Simon
- Seven Psalms
- ★★★★☆
Paul Simon is 81 and has no interest in pretending to be younger. Where other pop stars of his vintage continue to rage against the dying of the light – often from the vantage point of a lucrative greatest hits tour – he has accepted the hourglass is almost drained of sand and, on his 15th studio album, looks mortality in the eye.
Nobel laureate Derek Walcott once described Simon as a latter-day Walt Whitman – citing the opening verse of his 1986 hit Graceland (“The Mississippi Delta/Was shining like a national guitar/I am following the river down the highway/Through the cradle of the Civil War”).
That poet’s touch has not deserted Simon in the five years since he retired as a touring artist. He conjures breathtaking and wondrous imagery across this 33-minute, largely acoustic project (subtlety filled out with washes of electronic noise and backing from his wife Edie Brickell). “Dip your hand in heaven’s waters/God’s imagination,” he whispers on Your Forgiveness, a rumination on mortality and the presence of the divine in everyday life.
Simon’s voice is frailer than we remember. But Seven Psalms – one continuous composition best experienced in its entirety – is strikingly contemporary. The haunting spirit of neo-folkies such as Sufjan Stevens or Peter Broderick infuses the material. Spiralling flourishes of ambient electronica meanwhile suggest the artist has spent at least some of his quasi-retirement chilling to Brian Eno.
Simon will be forever synonymous with the soulful Boomer folk he made in the 1960s and his renaissance around Graceland in the 1980s. Seven Psalms is a beautiful coda to both phases of his career. It brims with autumnal angst while conveying the ultimately uplifting message that life and death are flip sides and, thus, to be celebrated rather than feared.
- Slow Moving Clouds
- Kolmas
- ★★★★☆
Artists such as Lankum have had huge success in combining folk with such experimental genres as drone music and neo-classical.
That same approach yields stunning results on the new album from Cork’s Kevin Murphy and his Slow Moving Clouds project.
Murphy cites influences like Haxan Cloak – who composed the gently terrifying score for Ari Aster’s Midsommar – and minimalist composer Arvo Part.
But the feverish velocity of tracks such as Krohn and Pearl River are entirely original. Folk fans looking for something fresh and dynamic could do worse than investigate Slow Moving Clouds’s forthcoming Irish tour.
