Karl Wallinger died far too young. We know for certain that he had a great deal more music in him because he'd told us so. He was in the final stretch of preparing and releasing what would have been the sixth World Party album, and the first in more than twenty years. So far, no posthumous releases have been forthcoming, so we can only wonder sadly at what might have been. As such, it means that in a career spanning more than three decades, there are only five albums that are definitively his, all released by his (virtually one-man) band, World Party. For a man of his talents, that's depressingly little.
Of those albums, 1991's Goodbye Jumbo, was by far the most successful. It arrived as the dawn of Britpop began to cast its golden rays. Not that Wallinger was ahead of the curve, exactly; he simply made the music in the styles he happened to love, which happened to coincide with somewhat of a renaissance of those styles. Wallinger's sound was firmly rooted in the styles of the 1960s. His love of the Beatles was never more than half a hook away, and his voice had the timbre of George Harrison with a good deal of Dylanesque phrasing in their to spice the mix.
But to my ears, Goodbye Jumbo was always a little underwhelming. There was a thinness to the sound that didn't quite work for me. The follow-up, Bang, didn't get my attention, either, and Wallinger and World Party silently slipped off my radar. But recently, I've been listening to the fourth World Party album, 1997's Egyptology. To my ears, it's one of the great lost albums of that year. And if you're student of 90s music like me, you'll know that 1997 was one heck of a year.
The problems that beset Egyptology were beyond its control. By 1997, the Britpop sun had begun to set, most typified by the coked bloat of Oasis' Be Here Now. Not only that, but with the still-from-the-future OK Computer, Radiohead ensured that any band whose aural palette was heavily inspired by days gone by would soon be relegated to the past themselves. In fact, one could argue that by pursuing such an organic sound, Wallinger erred in the same way Primal Scream did when they recorded the followed up their thrilling, pilling masterpiece, Screamadelica, with the Memphis-recorded, authentically-Stonesy Give Out But Don't Give Up; namely to be perceived to be unfashionably aping the past, rather than regenerating it. It was an unfair distinction, because in truth, these two albums sound a good deal better in 2024 than some of their more critically lauded and successful contemporary counterparts.
Compounding the issue was that Chrysalis, Wallinger's music label did a pretty lacklustre job of promoting the album before adding insult to injury by giving one of the album's more commercial ballads, 'She's the One', to Robbie Williams to record, who took it to number one. Rueful at the time, Wallinger came to value Williams' success with his song, as the royalties provided him and his family with much-needed financial support after Wallinger suffered a brain aneurysm in 2000. (To paraphrase Wallinger himself, Williams nicked his pick but gave him an awful lot of bacon in return.) All in all, then, not best circumstances in which to give an album its due.
And as far as I'm concerned, it's owed some dues. Wallinger was always so much more than a second-rate artist knocking off decent forgeries of better ones. He was a proper songwriter; a crafter of tunes who elegantly and innovatively bower-birded styles from all manner of sources to produce works that were uniquely his. And the suggested link between his fondness for The Beatles, output and the 1960s - whilst undeniably true - doesn't tell the half of. Take the song, 'Vanity Fair' for example. This haunting song owes as much to Roy Orbison as it does anyone else. It mines a similar vein to some of Chris Isaak's moodier work and wouldn't have sounded at all out of place in David Lynch film. Driven by one heck of a bass line, the song boils and bubbles sensuously and urgently.
As the album unfold, there are stylistic twists and turns that continue to surprise. There are flashes of Tom Petty's sunny drawl on songs like "Call Me Up", Bacharach strings, and on 'The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb' the rather surreal combination of guitar that brings The Stone Roses to mind, with a tumbling, saga-like lyric and vocal that sounds uncannily like Bob Dylan, particularly on his Traveling Wilburies' psychodrama, Tweeter and the Monkey Man. And this particular song is followed up by thirty seconds of Brian Wilson, because veering into Gary Moor territory.
One of album's highpoints is the song, "Rolling Off A Log". It is here that we hear Wallinger transcend the appeal and influence of his inspirations and produce something uniquely equal to them. Melodically inspired, it's a widescreen song that retains a sense of immediacy and intimacy. Arranged more than orchestrated, it's lyric is a meditative abstraction; of kind Neil Finn might have written if he'd been a member of Midnight Oil; a pastel abstract of a protest song, as much an existentialist rumination as an environmental riposte. It's daring stuff; musically as sincere as it comes, lyrically caught between frustration, curiosity and despair.
"Love is Best' is one of the most mature songs here, recalling those twin titans of melody, Paul McCartney and Neil Finn. It's a bittersweet blend befitting a mature man's perspective on the long-term relationship. The lyric is opaque yet intimate, laden in harmonies and major-minor shifts. It's a deeply meditative and moving song that rewards repeated listening, as does the album itself. And on of the things that fascinates the most is the shifts from song to song. 'Strange Groove' follows 'Love is Best', channelling Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie in the vocal phrasing whilst (appropriately) grooving along strangely at the slinky pace of The Stone Roses circa their unfairly maligned The Second Coming, before lurching back to the 60s with 'The Whole of the Night'.
As a result, the album is more challenging a first aural impression might suggest. It's decidedly tongue-in-cheek at times, no more so than when in the middle of "Call Me Up' there's a short piano breakdown over which Wallinger lyrically ponders the absence of piano breakdowns in popular song these days. It's a tongue-in-cheek flourish from a man with a facility for song writing and love of popular song. I don't know why Egyptology was so named, but to me, it's album that mines the past for inspiration, rather than a slavish attempt to imitate or re-create it. Wallinger's body of work is comparatively small, but there is a great deal to savour. If you're unfamiliar with his stuff, I'd encourage you to seek this one out and dive on in.
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