Paul Simon "Surprise" (Warner Bros.)
By
Wednesday. Sep 06, 12:40 AM
The sound of silence never sounded so sweet.

“The poet” turns to each side after scavenging inside himself, struggling for the answer that would give him a rebirth and validation so many moons after his youthful offerings graced the world with timeless beauty. But just as quick as that beauty left him, the answer came with a force as mighty as the gods themselves. The answer to all life’s great mysteries, the solution to his looming creative stasis, yes this is his key to an offering worthy of offering. The great answer... um… Brian Eno! Yeah, that’s it!

As much respect as I have for these two men and their amazing work of the past, Paul Simon himself puts it best on “Outrageous” when he says “I’m painting my hair the color of mud.” In fact, all this record really does is show an ageing man well beyond his peak reaching desperately for something fresh, something different. Unfortunately, Surprise does not yield any surprises at all, and like many men of his stature (Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, among others), he has set his sights on the “ultra modern” world of electronica to bring life to his latest release.

On Surprise, Simon truly presented Brian Eno with a daunting task. And to Eno’s sound designer / co-writer / savior credit, he did as much as one could imagine without turning the material into anti-song washes of blurry soundscapes (which actually sounds quite appealing in comparison). Surprise shimmers with bright spacey guitars, drifts with ethereal sonic clouds, and is even scattered with electronic beats. Yet, with all this and more, these songs still sink like a stone under the weight of Paul Simon’s lackluster songwriting.

Reduced to adolescent wordplay and painfully simple metaphors, Simon leaves little to be desired lyrically on this record as well. On “Everything About it is a Love Song,” Simon is reduced to singing about his own writer’s block: “Locked in a struggle for the right combination of words in a melody line.” The opening lines of very un-funky “Sure Don’t Feel Like Love” states: “I registered to vote today / felt like a fool, had to do it anyway.” Felt like a fool? The line exemplifies the filler that dominates this album. On the opener “How Can You Live in the Northeast,” he preaches, “If the answer is infinite light / why do we sleep in the dark?” “Another Galaxy” is one of the few moments on where everything doesn’t seem unnaturally forced, yet though it is nothing to jump up and down about, it does show there might be something left in Paul Simon’s ageing arsenal.

Despite the names and catalogs of Paul Simon and Brian Eno, Surprise is a very disappointing record overall, and fails to even remotely come close to touching the highlights of either man’s best. This is an album reeking of contractual obligation, and reveals an artist perpetuating his career seemingly for reasons other than art. After Surprise, the sound of silence never sounded so sweet.
www.paulsimon.com
www.warnerbrosrecords.com

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John Somers

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