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So pleased was he with the immediacy of this set of songs, he toyed with releasing them all as singles in advance of the album, but was talked out of it. Each one created to provide the depth, complexity and unique flavour to standout. If his voice has lost some of its spring during the ageing process, its lost none of the soulful phrasing.įat Pop is best explained in Culinary terms, it’s the equivalent of a selection of tasty Tapas dishes. An infectious 70s / Acid-Jazzy riff, flutters of flute and the feeling is way back, way back to his eponymous first solo LP with all that musical freedom. If you caught me saying Glad Times was arguably the best, then I can attest to Testify being my favourite. Next is Glad Times, arguably the strongest track, featuring a cameo from daughter Leah Weller, and explains why Conductor Jules Buckley selected this one to undergo a lavish orchestral reworking at the Barbican concert recently. A tick-tock intro with staccato Piano, there’s a hint of Stanley Road’s scuffling rhythm, rangy Guitar scales and Lia Metcalfe’s back again with a tasteful touch. No surprise that the next song Shades of Blue is the first single release. Weller demands ‘Who’s been the light when the world’s been so dark?’ and the more you listen, the more it speaks to his musical faith: ’Who’s always there when you really need them?’ The title track, Fat Pop, is quirky but significant as Its the motif for the whole album. Liverpudlian Lia Metcalfe (of The Mysterines) doubles up on vocals here and they hit off nicely. A brash, in your face affair: think Small Faces meets The La’s with restraint in the verse dispatching a thumping ‘sha-la-la-la-la-la’ chorus. The opener, Cosmic Fringes has melancholic tones of classic Blur: crisp guitar, electronic rhythms and semi-tone shifts up and down. The result? Fat Pop: an episodic album of twelve songs which exist in isolation but are loosely connected to the theme. So rather than ponder the solution, he turned to what has been the ‘biggest friend in my life’: a song. “For the first time in Forty Three years, I’m unemployed” he quipped. He had a Number One album, On Sunset, and wanted nothing more than to be out there performing it. Weller may often be adventurous, particularly during the third act inaugurated with 2008's 22 Dreams, yet he rarely seems as loose and playful as he does here, and that sense of mischief is an unexpected and welcome gift.During a live interview with BBC Radio 2’s Jo Whiley last Summer, Paul Weller was sharing his anguish of the then live music restrictions. 1 on a slightly subdued note, but that only helps to put the dynamism of the rest of the record into perspective. Half of the album's tracks clock in at under three minutes, a move that allows for the mellow closing numbers "In Better Time" and "Still Glides the Stream" to play a bit like a reflective coda. Everything from Curtis Mayfield to Traffic can be found within the contours of the set's 12 songs, familiar sounds that seem fresh due to unpredictable production juxtapositions, and a sharp decision to keep things tight and breezy. Plenty of Weller touchstones are evident. 1 is a dense, oversaturated collection of bold hooks, easy melodies, and multicolored sonics, a record that happily blurs distinctions between genre as it hops from mood to mood. 1 belongs to a very specific category of Weller album, the kind where the title accurately describes what lies inside (think Heavy Soul or Sonik Kicks). Though it doesn't sound much like either record, Fat Pop, Vol. 1, a bright burst of cheerful color arriving in the midst of a time of gloom. Even during busy times, he manages to release an album every other year, so when facing the lockdown accompanying the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, he did what comes naturally: he wrote and recorded a new album.