Label: BMG
Release date: 21. 10. 2022
Production: Simple Minds, Andy Wright & Gavin Goldberg
Album length: 38.10 min
Genre: Art Rock / Pop / New Wave
Rating: 9.0/10
How do you make a great electro rock and pop album in strange times, when you basically can’t go anywhere? Or worse, when you can’t do anything at all? Ask Glasgow’s Simple Minds, one of the longest-running new wave/synth art pop outfits from the British Isles. Because here’s the new record. Their eighteenth. “Direction Of The Heart”. While the world ground to a halt, the band’s only two remaining original members, Charlie Burchil and Jim Kerr, were stuck at home. Not in Glasgow. Both have lived in Sicily for years now. Since the rules of the recent p(l)andemic theater demanded maximum adaptation to “modest solitary isolation”, that eighteenth studio album ended up being the one recorded with the smallest crew of contributing musicians in the band’s whole career.
But that didn’t weaken the odds of making something top-notch. “Direction Of The Heart” is yet another gorgeous achievement, one that easily stands shoulder to shoulder with the band’s evergreen eighties classics. It’s brimming with that by-now unmistakable production, infectious musicality and seductive rhythms. The band’s image has evolved into a wonderful artistic maturity, and it doesn’t stop on the new album either. Electronics and rock once again join hands in a glow of nonchalance and deeply contemplative reconciliation. From the first second to the last. The album grabs you instantly with the opener The Vision Thing, also the first single, which the band put out back in June this year, and then the second, First You Jump, with a killer guitar line over the opening phrase, sucks the listener in with even more mood-drenched intensity. Pomp and bombast got their Simple Minds citizenship a long time ago. Yep. “Direction of the Heart” continues the story from its predecessor “Walk Between Worlds” (2018) and, of course, “Big Music” (2014). It brings nine tracks. Eight originals and one cover. Eight finely polished, masterfully arranged songs, and a cleverly rearranged cover that you could easily mistake for the band’s ninth original on the new album.
Burchill and Kerr co-wrote everything on the album, with only the singles First You Jump and Solstice Kiss also getting a co-writing credit for bassist Ged Grimes alongside the two legends. Burchill had to rely on himself more than ever before in his career while recording the new album. Besides the guitar, with its signature sonic contour and style, which, alongside Jim Kerr’s unique vocal charisma, is one of the band’s defining trademarks, he also contributed most of the bass lines, keyboards and drum programming this time around. The two women, drummer Cherrise Osei and backing vocalist Sarah Brown, recorded their parts in London, while Simple Minds picked the more convenient Chameleon studio in Hamburg for the recording, dodging Johnson’s hefty complications from the days of “Covid-19 theater”.
Of course, the band pulled some old ideas out of their sleeve on this album too. Even a few old recordings from the archives. Solstice Kiss dates back to the “Big Music” sessions, the great Human Traffic, featuring Sparks vocalist Russell Mael as a guest, goes even further back to the “Graffiti Soul” sessions (before that it carried the archival title Human Trafficking). And there’s more. Act Of Love is an upgraded version of an original dug out of dusty archives, going all the way back to 1978.
The mysterious Planet Zero, with its signature gloomy Simple Minds ambience reminding you this is a band from the post-punk boom of the late seventies, complete with space rock touches in the production, brings one of the most interesting artistic detours on the new album. The first version of this track goes back to 2011, when legendary Gong guitarist Steve Hillage worked with the band on the production. The song lays down a superb atmospheric detour ahead of the big finale, which belongs to the album’s cover of The Call’s 1983 hit The Walls Came Down. It packs the most rock punch in the production, along with some screaming vocal commands from the ever-brilliant Jim Kerr, stirring up a few parallels with the Simple Minds hits of the golden eighties. All with the band’s signature seductive production aesthetic (those classic new wave blankets of synths). Covers on studio albums are nothing new for Simple Minds, but this time the pick is one of the more fortunate ones. Especially because, in its style and arrangement, it rounds off the band’s whole new studio effort wonderfully.
Everything is (once again) in its place. Hypnotic catchiness. The bombast of rustling synth blankets that couldn’t sound more eighties, but of course with the band’s updated production for new times. Here are Burchill’s signature decorative guitar ornaments and, of course, the infectious vocal sorcerer Jim Kerr, without whom a Simple Minds album simply can’t exist. From start to finish, the album is steeped in the glow of grabby, hook-laden atmosphere, true bombastic theater that holds you tight. The guarantee is of course the exceptional musicality, crowned with ultra-melodic choruses. The direction carried over from the more-than-excellent predecessor “Walk Between Words” adds a new musical chapter to the story of this long-lived and venerable Scottish new wave band, which, with its new post-millennial renaissance, has in a way become immortal long ago. One more “detail”. “Direction Of The Heart” was recorded and finished two years ago. Let’s hope the band keeps up this high creative momentum going forward. With the new album, Simple Minds remain the very definition of easygoing musical rhetoric, and their artistic brilliance is still taking firmly measured steps of top-tier creativity in 2022.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Vision Thing
2. First You Jump
3. Human Traffic
4. Who Killed Truth?
5. Solstice Kiss
6. Act Of Love
7. Natural
8. Planet Zero
9. The Walls Came Down
Lineup:
Jim Kerr – vocals
Charlie Burchill – guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, drum programming
Ged Grimes – bass guitar, keyboards, programming (tracks 2, 5)
Cherisse Osei – drums on tracks 1, 7 and 9
Sarah Brown – backing vocals
Guest musicians:
Russell Mael – vocals on track 3
Andy Wright – backing vocals
Gavin Goldberg – backing vocals
