Scotland's Simple Minds continue to dazzle and impress with their sixth (and best) album, Sparkle in the Rain. The record was produced by Steve Lillywhite (U2, et al.), and it's a perfect match-up: Simple Minds aspire to music of a trancelike otherworldliness, and Lillywhite has the knack to lead them up that proverbial stairway to heaven.
The sound is Roxy Music-gone-2001, and it works remarkably well (one exception: their unlikely choice of an outside song in Lou Reed's "Street Hassle," which doesn't bear covering by anyone). Initially, vocalist Jim Kerr might seem like just another Bryan Ferry clone, but as he stokes his inner fires with some private perception of the emerald beyond – reaching an absolutely feverish pitch on "The Kick inside of Me" – he emerges as an obsessive visionary in his own right. The band, meanwhile, weaves a complex web of sound from the unlikeliest parts: churchy, staccato keyboards; lacelike, arpeggiated guitar lines and soaring wisps of feedback; and metallic-sounding drums.
Sparkle in the Rain is filled with potent images that can be read as religious emblems: baptismal immersion or death ("Waterfront"), redemption on the Cross ("East at Easter"), the Word ("Book of Brilliant Things"). Simple Minds find religious illumination in the vertigo of their fertile imaginations, and it comes out as psychedelic testifying – all fast movement and kaleidoscopic repetition – that builds to a crescendo of ecstasy and release. When Kerr sings, "Someday, some of them say that our hearts will beat like the wheels of a fast train" (from "Book of Brilliant Things"), you know you're in for a wild ride. All aboard.
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