Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *
Paul Simon, whilst quite rightly regarded as one of the most important and influential American musicians and songwriters of the 20th Century, has had moments in which, no matter how much you love him, you have to take a long hard look at his creative output and suggest that some albums really should have been left locked away in the vault and only ever released as a set of curiosities long after the gifted musician hangs up his guitar for the final time. Such is the fate that should have befallen the 1983 Hearts and Bones release.
Whilst lyrically it may have the odd section in which the listener can identify with the thoughts of the wandering minstrel, especially in the gracious opener of Allergies and Rene and George Margritte With Their Dog After The War, all too often the over-riding feeling is one of helplessness, of an abandonment and despair with very little hope of the album ever reaching the insightful highs that Paul Simon was noted for throughout his career.
Hearts and Bones grates on the skin and blisters the soul. The listener, especially if they are a fan of the man and his work, could well find Hearts and Bones an album in which it would be easier to sit through thirty years of party political broadcasts, at least then there would be a righteous indignation, an anger that Paul Simon captures in his early writing and which he then produced so magnificently in Graceland.
The trouble with looking back sometimes at an artist’s work in retrospect is that it is all too easy to look at the body of work as a whole, to place those albums that stir the emotions and capture the zeitgeist, whether personally or as wider take on the world events at the time, in ascending order from the very finest to those that in all honesty to have heard them once is once too many times. Paul Simon is no exception to this retrospective look back. In terms of album, Graceland would be considered by many as the epitome of the man’s contribution to world music, with So Beautiful Or So What, Sounds of Silence and Still Crazy After All These Years also making great waves. For every high it seems there must be a low and Hearts and Bones unfortunately fits the requirement of being the album that takes the listener down the route of low expectation.
Perhaps albums should be viewed like life, a period of personal history in seven parts rather than one huge bundle. However even life doesn’t work like that, an action you did in a rash moment in the teens can have long lasting effects well into your 50s and viewed between two albums of generous warmth and music excitement, it is almost with desperation that this particular recording was released.
With the two exceptions already mentioned the album has about as much warmth as an iceberg floating with no sense of purpose on the Atlantic waves. It is a shame because as with so many albums, especially when composed by an American legend, you never want to get to a point where the music becomes secondary to the discontent one sometimes feels as a listener.
Whilst Hearts and Bones may be the lowest point, the upside is that with a couple of years out of the studio Paul Simon came back with his greatest album to date, for that at least is the fitting epitaph to an album that feels as if it is born out of crisis.
Ian D. Hall