(Alternative/Indie Rock, Sophisti-Pop) [BSCD2] Prefab Sprout - Crimson/Red (Blu-spec CD2 release) - 2013, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

01. The Best Jewel Thief in the World 03:51
02. List of Impossible Things 03:43
03. Adolescence 04:27
04. Grief That Built the Taj Mahal 03:28
05. Devil Came a Calling 03:41
06. Billy 04:37
07. The Dreamer 06:01
08. The Songs of Danny Galway 03:48
09. The Old Magician 02:51
10. Mysterious 04:22
All songs written by Paddy McAloon

Paddy McAloon makes a heartfelt, hook-laden return. . .
“The beauty of a song is when you can combine universality with particularity,” says Paddy McAloon, speaking to Uncut about his first album in four years. Crimson/Red is, like pretty much everything Durham’s finest has made these past 30-plus years, an adoring tribute to the miracle of music, and a sincere exploration of what a mysterious privilege it is to be paid to make it.
But then, nothing makes a person count their blessings more thoroughly than the very real possibility of losing them. McAloon has suffered these last twenty years from Ménierè’s disease, a condition of the inner ear which can cause tinnitus, vertigo, loss of balance and, of course, deafness. Although one hesitates to patronize someone as extravagantly gifted as McAloon, the fact that he has overcome the affliction to such an extent that he plays every instrument on Crimson/Red is a remarkable feat in itself.
It’s a life of surprises, and the initial ones hit hard from the first wall of rich, jauntily rocking sound of opening track “The Best Jewel Thief in the World.” Firstly, it immediately brings to mind any number of classics from Prefab Sprout’s Thomas Dolby-produced mid-’80s imperial phase, with its analogue string synths layered to sound like a plastic orchestra, its trebly, textured guitars, its blue-eyed soul chord sequence established as hook long before the vocals start.
But secondly. . . Paddy McAloon still sings like a fresh-faced twenty-something. Which lends all the more energetic optimism to the song’s simple metaphor about the craft of the songwriter, stealing from the masters—or from the mysterious ether—to make noise that transcends literal meaning. The song is also good advice to the budding young songsmith in the face of haters and doubters: “What do those assholes know? . . Watch your legend grow.”
Lyrically the album is rich in universality with particularity. The singer with the shot voice in the ballad “List of Impossible Things” could be McAloon himself, but is really humanity’s refusal to accept our own limitations. “Devil Came a Calling” sees McAloon revive the ersatz Americana of “Faron Young” and cast himself as Faust, alluding to the rock ’n’ roll indulgence of his ’80s glory days but actually exploring mankind’s constant fall to temptation. And while “The Songs Of Danny Galway” and “Mysterious” are specific tributes to McAloon songwriting heroes Jimmy Webb and Bob Dylan respectively, they become poetic ruminations on McAloon’s own desire, as a songwriter, to “Annotate the feast” that is life.
The simple-but-complex nature of Crimson/Red’s themes is best summed up by “The Old Magician,” which is initially a witty metaphor about the ageing entertainer peddling “The tired act that no one loves,” broadens out into a bleak rumination on failed marriage (“She’s tired of being sawn in two”) and death (“a lousy disappearing act”), but also happens to have the cheeriest country-folk backing on the whole damn album. Ingenious, weird, and quintessentially McAloonesque.
But the final triumph of Crimson/Red doesn’t lie in the usual smart artifice. It lies in the fact that it is ridiculously catchy. McAloon assembled these songs from the vaults—“The Old Magician” is 16-years-old, “List of Impossible Things” has been tinkered with for a decade—on a deadline, and decided to forgo his normal tendency to take a hookline and sink it beneath modal twists and muso turns, and just let the choruses breathe. All of the songs mentioned plus the harmonica-led, yacht-rock note-to-self of the endlessly repeating “Billy” are once-heard, forever-whistled earworms, destined to get you humming annoyingly at the checkout in Tescos.
The result is an album that cuts through much of the cerebral work that being a Prefab Sprout fan generally entails, in favour of mainlining directly to the heart. It’s a genius pop album by a genius pop singer-songwriter. Or: A universally accessible joy from a particularly clever bastard. (Garry Mulholland, Uncut, posted 31.10.2013)
Q&A
Paddy McAloon
— Crimson/Red feels like the most sincere and musically straightforward album you’ve ever made. Do you agree?
— I know what you mean. But I have a problem with the word “sincere.” People take that to mean that you’re getting some straight talking from someone, and I don’t know that I like straight talking. It makes for earnest and dull records. But the goal I set myself this time was this: instead of fighting against simplicity, I would try and ride with it. And I’d let the burden fall on the lyrics or on the melodic hook. I’m dead conscious that people prefer things simple.
— “The Songs of Danny Galway” is about meeting your hero Jimmy Webb in Dublin. What was he like?
— It was in 1991 for a show on RTE about songwriters with orchestras. I did a duet with him on “The Highwayman.” He was very nice and very humble about his talent. I was too shy to say too much to him. I was just thinking, “You wrote ‘Wichita Lineman’!”
— You’re 56, but you still have the same boyish singing voice that sang “Lions in My Own Garden” in 1982. What’s your secret?
— Gargling with virgins’ blood I always find helps. I think my voice is OK because I didn’t hammer it for two hours a night for 30 years. It’s a side effect of not touring. See. . . vindicated at last. (Interview: Garry Mulholland)
https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/album/prefab-sprout-crimsonred

One of the most acclaimed British pop bands of the ’80s and ’90s, Prefab Sprout was the creative vehicle of vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Paddy McAloon, who has been regularly hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of his era. McAloon has often been compared favorably to Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney, and even Cole Porter, not just because of his lyrical and instrumental gifts but for the ambitious creative vision of his catalog. A notorious perfectionist who is also known for his shyness and his struggles with health problems, McAloon has created a relatively small body of work (ten albums in three decades), but Prefab Sprout’s music is beloved in the U.K., and they have a smaller but passionately loyal audience in the United States. Moving from the smart, beautifully crafted pop of 1984’s Swoon and 1985’s Steve McQueen (titled Two Wheels Good in the U.S.), Prefab Sprout would explore the influences of American music on 1988’s From Langley Park to Memphis, embrace the sound and style of stage musicals on 1990’s Jordan: The Comeback, use the Old West as a metaphor on the 2001 concept album The Gunman and Other Stories, and celebrated the power and energy of music on 2009’s Let’s Change the World with Music and 2013’s Crimson/Red.
Prefab Sprout were formed in Newcastle, England, in 1977 by Paddy McAloon, who sings and plays guitar and piano, and his bass-playing younger brother, Martin. In the group’s early days, McAloon spun several fanciful tales about the origin of their odd name (one favorite was that the young McAloon had misheard the line “hotter than a pepper sprout” in Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood's “Jackson”), but the truth is that an adolescent McAloon had devised the meaningless name in homage to the long-winded and equally silly band names of his late-’60s/early-’70s youth. With an early fan, Wendy Smith, drafted into the lineup to sing helium-register backing vocals, the trio released its first single, “Lions in My Own Garden (Exit Someone),” on its own Candle label in July 1982. Written for a girlfriend who had left Newcastle to study in Limoges, France (check the acronym of the title), the song was exceedingly clever, but obviously heartfelt. The single’s warm reception, including many plays on John Peel’s radio show, led to the Sprout’s signing to CBS subsidiary Kitchenware Records, which reissued the single in April 1983. Another single, “The Devil Has All the Best Tunes,” followed later that year.
Prefab Sprout’s first album, Swoon, was released in March 1984. Shortly after Swoon’s release, drummer Neil Conti joined the group, and Thomas Dolby was tapped to produce the second Prefab Sprout album, 1985’s Steve McQueen (retitled Two Wheels Good in the U.S. due to litigation from the late actor’s estate). Dolby smoothed out the kinks a bit, and his keyboards helped enrich the album’s sound. Prefab Sprout returned to the studio without Dolby in the summer of 1985 and quickly recorded an album’s worth of material that was initially meant to be released in a limited edition as a tour souvenir. However, several months after Steve McQueen was released, its song “When Love Breaks Down” (which had been released as a single four different times in the U.K. without chart success) finally became a hit, and CBS feared a new album would hurt its predecessor’s sales, so the project was shelved.
The “proper” follow-up to Steve McQueen was 1988’s From Langley Park to Memphis. It became their biggest hit, thanks to the massive U.K. chart success of “The King of Rock and Roll” (about a one-hit wonder stuck performing his silly novelty song on the nostalgia circuit; ironically, it was Prefab Sprout’s sole U.K. Top Ten hit and remains their best-known song) and the U.S. college radio success of the genial Bruce Springsteen parody “Cars and Girls.” Following that chart action, CBS dusted off the shelved acoustic project from 1985 and released it (in the U.K. only) under the title Protest Songs in June 1989. Issued in 1990, Jordan: The Comeback, which McAloon describes as a concept album about Jesse James and Elvis Presley, was released to enormous critical acclaim in late 1990, but unfortunately, its ornate, lush production and suite-like structure doomed it to commercial failure in the U.S., though it was another big hit in the U.K. A fine but unimaginative best-of, A Life of Surprises, met similar respective fates in the summer of 1992.
Many thought Prefab Sprout disbanded at that point, and indeed, Conti did leave the band at some point in the ’90s. However, McAloon had written (and in some cases, recorded) several albums’ worth of material during the first half of the decade, abandoning them all before finally releasing the crystalline Andromeda Heights in 1997. The album wasn’t even released in the U.S., but it was another deserved U.K. hit. An album of subtle beauty, Andromeda Heights showed how far McAloon had come as a songwriter and singer since Swoon.
A much-improved two-disc anthology, The 38 Carat Collection, was released by CBS in 1999 as the group was leaving the label. (Unexpectedly, the group’s U.S. label, Epic, belatedly reissued this set as The Collection in early 2001.) Wendy Smith left the group during this period, after the birth of her first child. Prefab Sprout, by this point consisting solely of the McAloon brothers, signed to EMI in late 2000 and delivered their Western-themed concept album, The Gunman and Other Stories, in early 2001. Unfortunately, the album’s release was delayed several months when Paddy McAloon was diagnosed with a medical disorder rendering him partially blind. As McAloon was homebound due to his health problems between 1999 and 2002, he wrote an album of music inspired by true life stories he recorded from radio broadcasts. Combining the radio recordings with orchestral arrangements of McAloon’s melodies, the mostly instrumental I Trawl the Megahertz became his first solo album when it was released in 2003.
After a six-year layoff, McAloon returned to recording as Prefab Sprout and released the self-produced, performed, and recorded Let’s Change the World with Music in 2009. This set’s songs and concept date to 1992 and were originally to be recorded as the follow-up album to Jordan: The Comeback; for various reasons, those sessions never happened. It was initially issued by Ministry of Sound and later in the year licensed by Sony/BMG in the U.K. In 2010, the independent Tompkins Square imprint issued the album in the United States. Both the album Crimson/Red and its lead single, “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” were issued by the Icebreaker label in 2013. In March 2017, a video posted on the Internet featured a homemade solo acoustic clip of McAloon performing an original song, “America,” a protest against U.S. immigration policies under Donald Trump. In 2019, Sony reissued McAloon’s I Trawl the Megahertz under the Prefab Sprout banner. (Stewart Mason, AllMusic)

Even though he had been suffering from hearing and sight impairments, Prefab Sprout man Paddy McAloon actually picked up the pace with the release of Crimson/Red, an album that follows Let’s Change the World with Music by four years, halving the eight-year wait after 2001’s The Gunman and Other Stories. It’s also interesting that songs like “Mysterious” (an appreciation of Bob Dylan) and “The Songs of Danny Galway” (a lush love letter to the work of Jimmy Webb) cover the same ground as Let’s Change the World’s numerous odes to the power of pop music, but that album was arguably “tricky,” because with the Sprout, overly smart and overly ambitious are the delicious pratfalls fans still savor. This one, like previous albums Steve McQueen (titled Two Wheels Good in the U.S.) and Jordan: The Comeback, is both grand and easily accessible, opening with a perfect example called “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” where busy and big work in tandem with the song’s highly infectious hook. Singing it aloud might just make you more clever and warm, while the great “Adolescence” (“What's it like? / It’s like a psychedelic motorbike / You smash it up ten times a day, then walk away”) sorts out that kinetic and wide-eyed stage of life quite nicely. The music throughout is just as beautiful and bold as the lyrics, with “Devil Came a Calling” being built out of a loving tower of country music camp, while the much smaller “The Old Magician” works its magic with a little bit of keyboards and guitar. A tight ten-song track list, immaculate production, and an overall classic album flow are all icing on the cake, and when it comes to McAloon quotables, “Power, wealth, and a mansion on Fellatio Dr.” jumps into the gifted man’s Top Ten. (David Jeffries, AllMusic)

Written and performed by Paddy McAloon
Produced by Paddy McAloon and Calum Malcolm