Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Like chalk and cheese, Paul Simon’s albums normally seem to go from exquisite high to downbeat low, from painstaking beauty to a desire left unfilled. It is in the nature of the listener to find absolute joy and the feeling of cold aloofness throughout every one of Paul Simon’s albums; however it is not one that normally follows in a single album.
Stranger To Stranger was always going to be a tough nut to crack, no matter how long it took to create, as it followed in the wake of the impressive and socially groovy, So Beautiful Or So What. like chalk and cheese the two albums are connected in appearance but not in taste and yet something has transcended across the two albums, a feeling that comes to us all in the cry of night, in the search for artistic control, and it is a haunting refrain that makes you shudder and weep when you realise the enormity of what you have musically digested.
In life you can only be certain of death, of passing on and leaving the day to others sit in the void of your space; it is a thought that we must all eventually come to and yet when listening to Stranger To Stranger that thought seems to come unnervingly too close, a lengthy kiss of destruction wrapped with fearsome beauty, a kiss of solitude that nobody can truly miss.
The musings of the final great adventure are not one to ever take too lightly, nor should they ever be dismissed as the thought of a bleak mind; if anything it is the creative drive that brings out the ashes, the scattering of clothes in the darkness and in songs such as The Werewolf, the absorbing Street Angel, In The Garden of Love and the hushed splendour of Insomniac’s Lullaby, Paul Simon nods and gestures with his usual sartorial music elegance the way of the world as he muses across six decades of performing experience and sees not only friendly faces urging him on but also Time smiling in the background, beckoning the artist to remember all that went before.
Chalk and cheese the albums may have been, hot and cold in output but they have always been delivered with sincerity.
Stranger To Stranger is an album of attraction, of acceptance and insight, it speaks more about one of half of America’s greatest ever folk duo than the listener has the right to know but in their awareness it carries huge significance and leaves them slightly breathless.
Ian D. Hall