Album review

By Derek Malone

Named for the Hell’s Kitchen intersection in New York City where Sting walked to the studio each day over a brisk three months of composing and recording, 57th and 9th seems as apt a title as any to represent the spirit encapsulated in this schizophrenic mélange of new songs.

Most notably, for many long-time fans, it is in part a new iteration of his rock song writing, which the ever-so-mercurial Sting had once adamantly claimed no longer interested him.

Like many a seasoned veteran of the pop chart wars, perhaps with the apex of his creative years behind him, Sting knows that when it comes to the process of making an album, it is often the case that the more preparation there is, the less is there. At some point, it’s best to just hit the ground running.

Thus, the bulk of the tracks were sussed out in the studio in a process he called, “musical ping pong” with a small core of long-time collaborators, Domenic Miller on guitar and Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, the latter embellishing the proceedings with exuberant fills and intricate webs of delicate cymbal work, which at times approach melody making. (Full disclosure: I’m a drummer.)

One exception is the energetic and lusty first single, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About You,” which features the backing of Tex-Mex country rock wunderkinds, The Last Bandoleros, on vocals with ubiquitous session man Josh Freese in the drummer’s chair. There are shades of The Police here, albeit with a contemporary alt-pop gloss.

“50,000,” the second track on the album, portrays a simulacrum of massive concert crowds and the surreal experience of being the subject of their adulation. There is a familiar Nirvana-like structure of a repressed verse that swells to a loud, droning chorus before dropping back into the gloom. You get the picture.

Mindful of the recent deaths of David Bowie, Prince, and Glenn Frey, “50,000,” is both a eulogy and rumination of an aging rock star who is humbled by the prospect of his own mortality after reading the obituary pages:

Reflecting now on my own past,
Inside this prison I’ve made of myself.
I’m feeling a little better today,
Although the bathroom mirror is telling me something else.

These lines of stress, one bloodshot eye,
The unhealthy pallor of a troubled ghost.
Where did I put my spectacle case?
I’m half blind and as deaf as any post.

50,000 hands are raised to a man that’s just like you and me.
We create the gods we can and gift them immortality.
Still believing that old lie, the one that your own face betrays,
Rock Stars don’t ever die, they only fade away.

In a recent interview with Jon Pareles of The New York Times, he claimed that the song was not about him. Somehow, I don’t think that’s true.

The melancholy continues in a similar stylistic vein with, “Down, Down, Down,” a rock chamber piece that tells a somber and moody tale of love lost.

In a savage gust of cocky, bad-boy panache, Sting belts out a fresh refashioning of one of rock n’ roll’s oldest tropes — the automobile as sexual metaphor — in the raunchy, irreverent poetics of the seduction number, “Petrol Head.” Awash in edgy minor key guitar, crashing cymbals, and the noisiness of heavy alternative rock, this material could have made an ideal new anthem for the late Lemmy Kilmister. It is clearly a black swan in Sting’s repertoire.

In a 2014 TED talk, Sting took to the stage, acoustic guitar in hand, to demonstrate how a prolonged and troubling bout of songwriter’s block was broken by his discovery that he could find fresh inspiration in the act of writing empathetically about people other than himself, preferably those without a voice. The result was nothing short of amazing, judging by the brief solo performance that followed.

He chose to portray denizens of his hardscrabble childhood in the town of Wallsend, England, which led to the composition of his sole Broadway effort, “The Last Ship.” The play was a box office disaster that closed after only four months, yet it was also a creative and personal triumph, one that still informs his work today.

I mention this because I believe it to be an essential key to understanding the artist that Sting is today, a kind of global village griot, or storyteller, bringing tales of love and woe from the perspectives of several different “characters” from all over the world. There is also a new theatricality in his singing, somewhat reminiscent of Roger Waters, but distinctly his own.

Of course, any jet-setting, pop megastar worth his salt these days must contribute a musical treatise on the dire threat of anthropogenic climate change, so we have “One Fine Day.” Now consider the following verse:

Today the North West Passage just got found
Three penguins and a bear got drowned
The ice they lived on disappeared
Seems things are worse than some had feared

A cynic might say that the funniest thing about these lyrics is that they are not witty coming from Sting, though they would be in the hands of a humorist like Tom Lehrer or Garrison Keillor.

Mercifully, an optimistic faith that future generations will be more enlightened about the current consensus of climatologists, “One Fine Day” provides a welcome ballast for his cataclysmic catalogue of terrors. Musically, the jazzy, alt-light arrangement feels airy, and even a little chipper. It’s arguably the catchiest tune on the album.

In the decidedly English, “Pretty Young Soldier,” a woman disguises herself as a man to join the army in some unspecified pre-twentieth century era in this quaint country waltz number with electric guitar and a complex, progressive groove.

“Heading South on the Great North Road” is a Celtic-inspired solo acoustic folk track, sung in a downtrodden workingman’s brogue. It plays like a bonus track from “The Last Ship” and feels incongruent here, a bit like filler.

“If You Can’t Love Me” is a mordant and doomy divorce song full of petulant anger. I hope for the sake of Trudie Styler that it’s not autobiographical.

An Arabic-infused chorus, backed by a percussive clang of the darbuka and ethereal strains of the oud and Turkish zither, grace the prayerful cultural appropriation, “Inshallah” (literally translated: If God wills.) This song evokes the plight of a Muslim migrant father at sea with his family, (undoubtedly en route to the beneficent shores of the EU,) who resigns himself to the uncertainty of their collective fate: “If it be your will, it will come to pass.”

Or, in showbiz English, Que Sera, Sera.

“The Empty Chair,” an elegy for the late journalist James Foley who was kidnapped and held for 44 days before being murdered by ISIS in 2014, is a haunting, solo acoustic piece. A rather strange denouement, for this strangest of albums.

Sting’s new 57th and 9th is available on:

Amazon: http://amzn.to/2lrws0D

iTunes: goo.gl/YpSYH0