Soft Cell - *Happiness Not Included (2022)

I feel I could justifiably just write fucking hell and leave the review at that. I generally experience a certain degree of scepticism regarding any comeback that wasn't Elvis, but I'm not sure it applies here. There's a difference between a group recording their first new material in twenty years and the reanimated corpses of formerly beloved entertainers giving the loyal fanbase udder one last desperate squeeze which - funnily enough, Soft Cell obliquely address on Nostalgia Machine, which almost counts as the grandson of Memorabilia if you squint a bit.

Anyway, I inevitably approached this one with caution because you never know, and even Elvis kind of blew it at the end. Thankfully, it sounded pretty good, and continued to sound pretty good, and then one morning I woke with I'm Not a Friend of God stuck in my head, something which probably hasn't happened since I woke with Little Rough Rhinestone lodged in my head back in whichever century that was. After Cruelty Without Beauty, I knew this would be worth a listen, but I'm not sure I imagined it would be this good.

It works because there's no self-conscious effort to repeat former glories beyond simply doing what Soft Cell always did best. We're not trying to pretend it's still the eighties like in Stranger Things, and we're not trying to pretend that anything is fun or cool because that's never anything that Soft Cell were about - in case you somehow failed to notice. Musically, we're mixing technopop with traces of soul of the kind Dave Ball always did so well, along with a few less obvious elements, and Ball's John Barry homages seem to have evolved into a relative of Aaron Copland - which is odd but sounds perfectly natural - and Tranquiliser has about it a trace of Nashville in certain respects; and yet Purple Zone, recorded with the involvement of the Pet Shop Boys and very much sounding it, is nevertheless perfectly at home.

Almond's lyrics remain as beautifully acerbic and well observed as ever, not least because no-one is trying to pretend we're still eighteen, and this stuff speaks to me just as it did when we were all a bit younger, randier, skinnier, and possibly more perverted. In fact it moves me right now in 2022 just as it did in 1981, and the title track is in particular an air-punchingly joyous fuck off to certain representatives of the generation which believes it invented many of the feelings expressed on this record but really didn't. I vividly recall once sitting in a school art room listening to a couple of hairies dismissing the teenybop benders who dared soil a Jimi Hendrix masterpiece, and I knew then that I was on the right side of history - to make an overused contemporary reference. This album lets me know that I still am, which is nice. Never mind the comeback, *Happiness Not Included may even be the best thing they've ever recorded.

Jay-Z - The Blueprint III (2009)

I kept tabs on Jay-Z right up until just before this album came out, then lost the thread due to moving house, moving country, and a load of other stuff happening all at the same time, not least being marriage. Once the dust had settled, I came across this in CD Exchange. It hadn't even occurred to me that he might have kept on putting out new material in my absence, particularly given the number of times he'd already announced his retirement. My hopes weren't high given that the last two had been pretty underwhelming, but what the fuck? I thought.

It didn't make much of an impression at first, which is why I've had The Blueprint III on my shelves for a couple of years and only now have I come to play it more than twice in the same week; and yet it made some impression because I kept listening, albeit infrequently. I've had both Kingdom Come and American Gangster significantly longer and still couldn't tell you a single thing about either, except that the pillock from Coldplay is on one of them.

I always had the impression Jay-Z was on a mission to record the mythic classic rap album, solid from start to finish, the set which would hold its own alongside Illmatic and the rest. He came close more than once but I'm not convinced either The Blueprint or The Black Album ever quite got there, great though they undoubtedly were. Given how The Blueprint III follows a couple of duds and  represents the third recycling of a winning title, I had a feeling it was going to be one of those in the vein of The Dynasty which just sort of sits there between a couple of better records - not actually bad, but not something you'd necessarily bother including on your CV; but now that I've made the effort, I realise I'm wrong, and The Blueprint III may even have been his best - if not in terms of immediacy.

The standout tracks, What We Talkin' About, Empire State of Mind, and Real As It Gets are easily amongst the lad's greatest for my money, perfecting what I suppose we might as well call stadium trap - cinematic whilst somehow invoking Aaron Copland through the thoroughly contemporary orchestration - at least as of 2009 - of vaguely epic squiggles copied and pasted to different bits of a screen; and it probably helps that the rest of the record does its own thing rather than attempt to capitalise on this winning formula. No ID, Timbaland, the Neptunes and others - notably Kanye West before we all got sick of hearing about the fucker - chop up something extrapolated from that New York sound rooted in DJ Premier and the like, soulful with a lot of kick in the lower end but without necessarily covering old ground. Only Swizz Beatz lets the side down, phoning in another one of those things which sounds as though it came from the soundtrack of Jersey Shore and should rightfully be backing a loop of Deena saying something fucking stupid about how much she likes to party; but never mind. Everybody is allowed at least one clunker when the rest is good.

Lyrically speaking, Jay-Z does what he usually does, namely bigging himself up for an hour or so with a reasonable degree of wit. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, and on this occasion it works really well. Swizz Beatz aside, all the elements here add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, resulting in album of such fresh and breezy composition that it has the feeling of a debut - not bad going for a guy who had just reached the end of his second decade in the biz.