Nice review of P's album in today's paper. Rated 4/5. Best album in a decade.

link?

Philly76 said:

link?

Unfortunately the Times uses a paywall, so you can't see the whole article, but here is the link to the page containing the truncated review:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk...217687.ece

Journalist Will Hodgkinson 26 Sep 2014:

Prince calls it the feedback loop: that ebbing, shifting morass of shared information, taste and commerce that causes three Hollywood studios to make films about zombies at the same time, online sensations explode and die out in days and thousands of bands all come up with the same sound at once.

Prince is not in the feedback loop and he hasn’t been for a long time. He’s the music industry’s remaining equivalent of a silent movie star, its last enigma, raging quietly at the injustice of an era where a lack of musical ability is not a bar to success and there are no secret lives of the rich and famous any more, just a drip-feed of digital high-fives to a few million people on Twitter.

With no stern manager to advise him otherwise, the 56-year-old is doing whatever he likes, which has led to his current incarnation: lead guitarist fronting an all-girl funky rock band. He’s also releasing two albums at once (this is the one I was allowed to hear; the other isArt Official Age) and he spent much of 2014 turning up at a moment’s notice to venues in cities around Europe, telling the promoter to cancel whoever was booked that night and blowing the minds of a few hundred people who couldn’t quite believe they were getting so close to an astonishingly gifted superstar who seems so unknowable that you half-suspect he doesn’t actually exist.

Finally, in one of the great volte-faces of modern times, Prince has even gone back to Warner, the very label that inspired him to scrawl “Slave” on his face and change his name to an unpronounceable symbol for much of the N ineties. He also seems to have done away with grammar and spaces between words, just as he invented text speak in the Eighties on titles like I Would Die 4 U. He really is out on his own.

Plectrumelectrum, originally intended for release in March, is essentially a funk-rock album, which is well outside current trends. It’s also the best album Prince has put together in more than a decade — and his most cohesive after uncomfortable attempts to navigate the Wild West of 21st-century music distribution with albums released as covermounts on newspapers and subscription websites that have come and gone in a whirl of confusion.

It’s a blend of colossal Led Zeppelin-style riffs, funky rhythms, moments of sweet, reflective balladry, Sixties girl-group pop and anthemic celebrations of Amazonian strength and glamour, all held together by a strong sense of discipline. A notoriously hard taskmaster — his former drummer Bobby Z recalled a musician being sacked for looking at his watch — Prince has said that if the three women in 3rdeyegirl don’t match up to his 24/7 work ethic they’re out. You can hear it. There’s intense nervous energy underneath the apparent joyousness of the music.

The album begins with a blistering track called Wow, a Jimi Hendrix-influenced blast of monolithic guitars and pounding drums that must be the heaviest thing Prince has recorded. Pretzelbodylogic follows and it isn’t as convincing. Featuring guitarist Donna Grantis, drummer Hannah Ford and bassist Ida Nielsen shouting “Pretzel body logic is so much fun”, it may well be intended as a surrealist chant, but it sounds more like a bunch of cheerleaders on a night out at TGI Friday’s. That and Fixurlifeup, a hectoring moment of inspirational rock about the importance of hard work on which Prince sounds less like a funky freak and more like a Tory MP railing against feckless youth, are the only weak moments in an album that otherwise heralds a long-awaited return to form.

Prince has always had a way with a pretty ballad, andPlectrumelectrum has the gentle, transcendent Whitecaps, which has a melody not dissimilar to Wooden Ships by Crosby, Stills & Nash, but with an added air of luxury, not surprising given that it was inspired by the shimmers of the ocean outside Prince’s Caribbean hideaway.

Another high point is Tictactoe, made up of hazy layers of overlapping harmonies and inspired by the Eighties dream-pop trio the Cocteau Twins. “You can’t understand the words of Cocteau Twins songs, but their harmonies put you in a dreamlike state,” Prince says of the song, which was written late last year after a night of partying at Bryan Ferry’s studio in London. The Cocteau Twins are not the first band you would associate with the funkiest man on the planet, but Prince has always escaped being defined by the usual identity markers of race, sex and class. The first thing he said to Lenny Waronker, the Warner executive who signed him in 1977, was: “Don’t make me black.”

Prince calls Plectrumelectrum “the new garage band record”, going on to state that if he were a 13-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time this is the album he would learn to play, note for note. It does have an in-the-red rawness, from the self-explanatory Funknrollto the Hendrix-like Aintturninround. That rawness comes from Prince’s decision to record live with very few overdubs, but it’s combined with virtuosity too. Nielsen, who left her native Copenhagen in 2010 to join Prince’s other band the New Power Generation before becoming the bassist for 3rdeyegirl, recalls one practice session that went on for 26 hours. The average garage band generally heads down the pub after 30 minutes.

Is there a classic here to match Purple Rain or Gett Off? No, but few musicians write songs of that quality in their lifetime and Prince has written at least a dozen. However, there’s a sense of immediacy and an indomitable spirit to Plectrumelectrum; in an age without secrets it feels as though it has emerged from its own distant world. Prince is way out of the feedback loop, in a hinterland where he is joined only by those he invites in. As this album of unfashionable but intense and undeniably funky rock proves, it’s the best place for him. (Out Mon, Warner Bros)

Thank you for posting the article.

autismrocks said:

Journalist Will Hodgkinson 26 Sep 2014:

Prince calls it the feedback loop: that ebbing, shifting morass of shared information, taste and commerce that causes three Hollywood studios to make films about zombies at the same time, online sensations explode and die out in days and thousands of bands all come up with the same sound at once.

Prince is not in the feedback loop and he hasn’t been for a long time. He’s the music industry’s remaining equivalent of a silent movie star, its last enigma, raging quietly at the injustice of an era where a lack of musical ability is not a bar to success and there are no secret lives of the rich and famous any more, just a drip-feed of digital high-fives to a few million people on Twitter.

With no stern manager to advise him otherwise, the 56-year-old is doing whatever he likes, which has led to his current incarnation: lead guitarist fronting an all-girl funky rock band. He’s also releasing two albums at once (this is the one I was allowed to hear; the other isArt Official Age) and he spent much of 2014 turning up at a moment’s notice to venues in cities around Europe, telling the promoter to cancel whoever was booked that night and blowing the minds of a few hundred people who couldn’t quite believe they were getting so close to an astonishingly gifted superstar who seems so unknowable that you half-suspect he doesn’t actually exist.

Finally, in one of the great volte-faces of modern times, Prince has even gone back to Warner, the very label that inspired him to scrawl “Slave” on his face and change his name to an unpronounceable symbol for much of the N ineties. He also seems to have done away with grammar and spaces between words, just as he invented text speak in the Eighties on titles like I Would Die 4 U. He really is out on his own.

Plectrumelectrum, originally intended for release in March, is essentially a funk-rock album, which is well outside current trends. It’s also the best album Prince has put together in more than a decade — and his most cohesive after uncomfortable attempts to navigate the Wild West of 21st-century music distribution with albums released as covermounts on newspapers and subscription websites that have come and gone in a whirl of confusion.

It’s a blend of colossal Led Zeppelin-style riffs, funky rhythms, moments of sweet, reflective balladry, Sixties girl-group pop and anthemic celebrations of Amazonian strength and glamour, all held together by a strong sense of discipline. A notoriously hard taskmaster — his former drummer Bobby Z recalled a musician being sacked for looking at his watch — Prince has said that if the three women in 3rdeyegirl don’t match up to his 24/7 work ethic they’re out. You can hear it. There’s intense nervous energy underneath the apparent joyousness of the music.

The album begins with a blistering track called Wow, a Jimi Hendrix-influenced blast of monolithic guitars and pounding drums that must be the heaviest thing Prince has recorded. Pretzelbodylogic follows and it isn’t as convincing. Featuring guitarist Donna Grantis, drummer Hannah Ford and bassist Ida Nielsen shouting “Pretzel body logic is so much fun”, it may well be intended as a surrealist chant, but it sounds more like a bunch of cheerleaders on a night out at TGI Friday’s. That and Fixurlifeup, a hectoring moment of inspirational rock about the importance of hard work on which Prince sounds less like a funky freak and more like a Tory MP railing against feckless youth, are the only weak moments in an album that otherwise heralds a long-awaited return to form.

Prince has always had a way with a pretty ballad, andPlectrumelectrum has the gentle, transcendent Whitecaps, which has a melody not dissimilar to Wooden Ships by Crosby, Stills & Nash, but with an added air of luxury, not surprising given that it was inspired by the shimmers of the ocean outside Prince’s Caribbean hideaway.

Another high point is Tictactoe, made up of hazy layers of overlapping harmonies and inspired by the Eighties dream-pop trio the Cocteau Twins. “You can’t understand the words of Cocteau Twins songs, but their harmonies put you in a dreamlike state,” Prince says of the song, which was written late last year after a night of partying at Bryan Ferry’s studio in London. The Cocteau Twins are not the first band you would associate with the funkiest man on the planet, but Prince has always escaped being defined by the usual identity markers of race, sex and class. The first thing he said to Lenny Waronker, the Warner executive who signed him in 1977, was: “Don’t make me black.”

Prince calls Plectrumelectrum “the new garage band record”, going on to state that if he were a 13-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time this is the album he would learn to play, note for note. It does have an in-the-red rawness, from the self-explanatory Funknrollto the Hendrix-like Aintturninround. That rawness comes from Prince’s decision to record live with very few overdubs, but it’s combined with virtuosity too. Nielsen, who left her native Copenhagen in 2010 to join Prince’s other band the New Power Generation before becoming the bassist for 3rdeyegirl, recalls one practice session that went on for 26 hours. The average garage band generally heads down the pub after 30 minutes.

Is there a classic here to match Purple Rain or Gett Off? No, but few musicians write songs of that quality in their lifetime and Prince has written at least a dozen. However, there’s a sense of immediacy and an indomitable spirit to Plectrumelectrum; in an age without secrets it feels as though it has emerged from its own distant world. Prince is way out of the feedback loop, in a hinterland where he is joined only by those he invites in. As this album of unfashionable but intense and undeniably funky rock proves, it’s the best place for him. (Out Mon, Warner Bros)

Thanks for posting that. Do these young journos really put 'Gett off' on a par with 'Purple Rain' in the pantheon of his greatest works? That alone boggles my mind. Let's not mention the lazy Hendrix comparisons. I guess like the lyrics in 'The Last December', They only know what they know!