The great thing about coming to an album where the artist has already released a fair number of the tracks as singles is that you already have some understanding of the artist, their musical breadth, their artistic scope. But it is when you find all of those tracks together in one place that things really fall into place.
And so it is with Paul Cafcae’s new album, Scarlet and Sparks. If the singles showed me that this is an artist with a sonically adventurous and genre-hopping character, the album, when taken as a whole, shows the consistency of the artist’s sound.
That may sound odd, given that the album contains so many sonic threads, everything from blues to folk to punk to rock and roll, high-octane groovers to seductive ballads. But the common cause running through all of these songs is sonic truth. Paul Cafcae is a roots artist, and no matter what genre he chooses to explore, he manages to get right down to its essence.
Take “Fresh Winds Blowing,” which kicks things off, a song running on a glammy-garage rock, raw and unrefined, riff-driven strut that reminds us that rock and roll is less about ideas and more about energy; this is Dionysian territory rather than that of Apollo, music of the heart rather than the head, music to be felt rather than understood. Similarly, “You Cannot Get To Heaven” connects punk with old-school rock and roll, no matter how much the old punks thought they were building something new…this is Johnny Cash fronting the Clash, and neither of them is compromising their signature sound.
At the other extreme is “Eileen,” a song built out of…well, not that much at all, again reminding us that if less is more, then this much less must be so much more. I think that he has a very valid point.
Even when he decides to cover others, he is looking for something new. In the case of Prince’s “Purple Rain” (sacrilege, I hear you cry), Paul turns the seductive and anthemic pop-rock into a country-punk hoedown. “Devil’s Right Hand”, although not a cover, explores the same lyrical ideas as the Steve Earle classic, which it references both as a low-slung rock and roll piece and a bonus, purer solo take.
But getting to the essence of the sound is only half the story, many of the songs also have plenty to say about the state of the world today, drilling down into the darker corners of society and speaking truth to power. “Banks of Marble” explores the same themes of the distribution of wealth, of the haves and have-nots, us and them, as the Pete Seeger song that it is inspired by did 75 years ago, proving that nothing ever really changes, and the aforementioned opening salvo says it all just in the title…a fresh wind is blowing, politically speaking, but in which direction and to what end?
Scarlet and Sparks covers a lot of ground stylistically and in terms of what it has to say. It is a perfect example of how you can wander all over the musical landscape and still sound like yourself.
