Going To Waste(land)
Paul Simon
Surprise
(Warner Bros.)
Former white worldbeat ringleader Paul Simon teams with Afro-Talking Heads svengali Brian Eno.
First off, anyone with the expectation Surprise will be anything like Graceland, Rhythm Of The Saints, My Life In The Bush With Ghosts, or Remain In Light will be disappointed. Not that an album of that nature is demanded of this pair, but when Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash or Joe Henry and Solomon Burke got together, the result was in the ballpark.
Surprise, though the product of two aging and understandably less-cutting edge artists, is less than the sum of its parts. Swimming in smooth, adult-electro backdrops provided by Eno and overlaid by standard, polyrhythmic skat/sing by Simon, all 11 tracks are pleasant but hardly interesting. Simon remains a playful wordsmith struggling with nagging social responsibility (“Sure Don’t Feel Like Love”) and coming to grips with financial security in the face of larger problems (“I got a call from my broker . . . said he was mistaken/Maybe some virus or brokerage jokes and he hopes my faith wasn’t shaken”). Yet musically, Surprise is all antiseptic, a densely layered fudgecake iced by Simon’s ageless voice.
5
— Steve Forstneger
