Jane Weaver, an old and very good friend of this blog with her latest, probably a natural culmnation of the last few:
This is a very, very good album. If I hear a better record in the whole of 2021 I'll be deeply content. I'm getting the sense from the things I've heard thus far that this is going to be a very good one for music but it's going to need something very special to top this particular record in terms of my affections as so many things on Flock align in almost perfect symmetry to my personal radar.
I knew I was going to like this before I started listening to it but I have to say on the second run through it that I'm surprised how much I'm deeply taken by it already. It reminds me of one of my first, true music loves, Simple Minds' wonderful peak of creative activity New Gold Dream 81, 82, 83, 84. The records seem to share DNA to me. There's something so assured and intuitive about both records. A sense of arrival to a place where both artists were heading towards almost inevitably with the records they put out previously.
Jane Weaver has been a fixture on this particular blog for several years. Ever since the release of The Silver Globe in 2015 she seems to have moved forward with a clear and particular vision that has led her to Flock, to my mind her best record and certainly her most commercial sounding one. She's always had an appreciable Pop knack but The Silver Globe and the records that succeeded it were definitely more outre in terms of their trappings. She was on the Finders Keepers record label after all. The spiritual home of those who treasure the obscure and esoteric.
Flock is something else and it reminds me most of all of two particularly glorious British Pop eras. Two years really. 1972, when Roxy, T.Rex, Sparks and Bowie first strutted into the pop sunlight, shaking away the residual dust of the sixties as they made their way into the charts and onto Top of the Pops. Then ten years onward to 1982 when the equally outlandish and extraordinary likes of Associates, Simple Minds, Japan, Visage and ABC miraculously did a similarly wonderful thing, I can hear all of this in Flock ,but at the same time it never feels like a mere retread, more like a new dawn. All on one record. It's that good.
Of course what came between 1972 and 1982 among other things were Bowie's Berlin albums, Krautrock and most particulary Kraftwerk, and Neu! and I'd say that these are the bands that form the bedrock of the sound that Weaver has martialled so successfully on previous records and which now comes to full pop fruition on Flock. This sounds almost like a collection of hit singles to me. They probably won't be, though I would expect the album to make some kind of commercial splash. It certainly deserves to.
Add Funk to the mix, and Flock is seriously funky at times, (Jane channels Prince, I promise you), and a couple of tracks that are more Stereolab than Stereolab, but in a great way, and you have this record. A musician who has always done exactly what she wants has arrived at her 11th album to make a record she 'has always wanted to make'. To see an artist coming to this peak of achievement so far into their career is a joy, pure and simple.
This is a model lesson in sticking to your guns and guiding principles and striding down a path of your own making. Flock is a record that surpises constantly, while remaining constant to the core values established by Weaver's previous work. Hear it. It's a wonder. A dream you never want to end.
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