Written by: Dave Cantrell
Songs, if properly created, are malleable. They’re like kids – like any of us, at least in theory – constant works in process, always, at the level of their emotional DNA, amenable to change, to reshaping, being newly honed. Any song – and this applies to any work of art for that matter – that lacks that basic flexibility is a dead song, a kind of hollowed husk of overworn nostalgic melody left to the scavenges of old-timers lost in comfort and balm. Which, to back up a bit into gentle contradiction, isn’t entirely a bad thing. Personally, the last thing this writer wants is someone, including the artist themselves, fucking with a song that is, to my mind, unfuckwithable – “London Calling,” for rather obvious instance, could not should not ever be reinterpreted not even by the ghost of Joe Strummer himself — but generally, especially as pertains to the league of legendary songsmiths, be it Dylan Neil Patti Leonard Joni or, come to that, this fellow Pete we’re speaking of today, their work is strong and lasting enough to not simply survive reinterpretation but gain a new, and often more nuanced, life. And while most often these rereadings come at the hands of fellow artists, it’s sometimes the case, rare but not unheard of, for the songwriter themselves to take up that task and thus do we come to Tall Stories & New Religions (released March 15th on the irreproachable Tapete label), wherein Mr. Astor, casting back over a full forty years of recorded output, has gathered together a crack cast of studio mates and freshly excavated a dozen tracks he felt that, for various reasons – inadequate production values, the evaluation over a long interim of personal perspective – could use a redo. The result, not unpredictably, is another gem of an album to add to the guy’s trove of same.
We begin with the lilting, gently exuberant “Model Village” – a 2006-released A-side from The (briefly revivified) Loft – that somehow allows for the phrase ‘lovingly sardonic’ as it maps out a terrain where “no one feels the pain” with such immersive pure pop sincerity, not to mention a none-more-genuine empathy and the type of timeless melody upon which Astor’s reputation rests that, what with the rich audio upgrade and all, instantly becomes a new favorite jewel in this particular artist’s crown and we’ve only just bloody begun. I mean, we haven’t even gotten to the smooth swampy swinging update of “Chinese Cadillac” that now has ‘veritable A-side’ spray-painted across its entire chassis (it was one of the B-side tracks to The Weather Prophets’ 1988 Hollow Heart 12″), the sweetly dolorous tone that already infused “She Comes From the Rain” now so casually lustrous it may well make a Weather Prophets devotee mist up a little bit or the quiet stunner that is the new, matured “Head Over Heels” that from its earliest days on the Prophets’ 1987 debut LP to this current version evokes an entire lifetime of emotion in a mere two minutes forty-one seconds. And that’s fine since it’s the somewhat lesser-knowns that most truly carry the grab-bag nature that often defines an album of this sort anyway, turning it, in this case and without haste, into a full-on Pete Astor classic that flows with such an assured, unostentatious luminosity that it instantly becomes a must-have for any fan of the artist’s work (and please do note that your iconic Astor-penned pearls such as “Almost Prayed” or “Up the Hill and Down the Slope” or, say, “Like Frankie Lymon” are absent from this re-rendering as, we imagine, they were no doubt judged to have already been as close to perfection as is humanly possible).
And, really, what more to say? We see no critical need to further elaborate on the countless merits that pour so subtly forth at every turn (lily-gilding is never a good look) but do let us add as our conclusion that you truly do need to hear this record as, for one, the sublime is simply everywhere – check out the absolutely sumptuous take on the deep dive track “Emblem” from Submarine should you require one more mote of convincing – and for two, life’s too short to pass up beauty like this. [grab you copy be your preferred format digital, vinyl, or CD here]