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Rating: Never judge a book by its cover, said someone, but in the case of "Last Days Of The Century", the eleventh album by Al Stewart dated 1988, the artwork is highly revealing about the content and value of the work: are you familiar with the covers of "Year Of The Cat" and "Time Passages"? Two small works of art for two wonderful records, but LDOTC gets a pseudo-futuristic sketch with flashy colors, flat, unattractive, and decidedly unoriginal, adjectives that can easily be used to describe the album in question. If nothing else, compared to the equally unsuccessful "Russians & Americans" four years earlier, here there is a greater stylistic cohesion, unfortunately favoring electronically infused sounds that at best have little to do with Al Stewart's style, resulting in a clumsy and ineffective record, a classic "wishful thinking" work.
The peak of this album is that when Al Stewart remembers to be the wonderful artist he is, there is no competition: "Fields Of France", a beautiful and evocative piano line, the fairytale and melancholic sound of a flute and lyrics that make you fly with your imagination, back to the myth of the great pioneering aviation aces who dueled in aerial battles in the Great War, now a distant and faded memory. This is Al Stewart, a simple, elegant, communicative artist, who knows how to give dreams and emotions with his gentle and soothing voice and his innate taste for melody; unfortunately, however, of this Al Stewart, except for this episode, there are very few traces in "Last Days Of The Century". The opening, marked by a beautiful title track, seems to promise great things, a return to the rock glories of "24 Carrots" with a touch more of new wave: a compelling and engaging rhythm and an anthemic refrain for great stages well-supported by female choirs, but unfortunately, it's almost a flash in the pan. To understand the "hidden evil" of this album, the most significant example is "Red Toupèe": the usual squeaky keyboards present in about a hundred '80s radio hits flatten what could have been a fun and well-executed folk-pop episode, though the worst comes with the boring and banal contrived rockabilly of "License To Steal", and the '80s mediocrity of "Bad Reputation" with the usual basses and keyboards and the usual, pleonastic guitar phrasing; not shining for originality and freshness even the final "Antarctica", although endowed with a fairly catchy melodic line, that fades into an instrumental with a highly catchy and evocative title, "Ghostly Horses On The Plain", but an arpeggio accompanied by sound effects is certainly not enough to create any particular atmosphere, thus closing the album with the same impressions of incompleteness and approximation that accompany it throughout its duration.
Nevertheless, "Last Days Of The Century" is enriched by some well-crafted episodes that save it from failure, allowing it to reach the threshold of a hard-earned but full adequacy: "Josephine Baker", an elegant and convincing folk song, free from the electronic heaviness that burdens the rest of the album and the refined smoky and reverberating swing of "Real And Unreal"; even "King Of Portugal" and "Where Are They Now" can be considered as good episodes with appealing atmospheres that try to reinterpret in a modern key (for those times) the classic style of Al Stewart. Compared to the makeshift "Russians & Americans", this 1988 Al Stewart offers a structurally better album with many pleasant moments, but decisively too sycophantic and lost in chasing the stylistic trend of the moment; with "Last Days Of The Century" closes a non-prolific decade to forget for the Glasgow singer-songwriter, which the '90s will return to his natural dimension, resized but redirected on the right path, ready for a slow but steady rebirth.
Tracklist and Lyrics
07 Josephine Baker (04:13)
I was watching TV late last night
And a scene transported me
Long gone figures came back to life
In a documentary
Though I saw them dance for joy
I was sad I missed that show
If I had a time machine
I know just where I'd go
I was born too late to see Josephine Baker
Dancing in a Paris cabaret
Born too late to see Josephine Baker
She must have been great in her heyday
Now some they stand out from a crowd
Even at an early age
I suppose that her call was loud
'Cause she just lit up the stage
You can put on all that gloss
And still not have to feel
What's inside will come across
And only real is real
I was born too late to see Josephine Baker
Dancing in a Paris cabaret
Born too late to see Josephine Baker
She must have been great in her heyday
I'm sometimes trapped by the close confines
Of the age I'm born into
Though there were others worse than mine
Well, I miss what I can't do
Join the feast of Ancient Greece
See Alexander's Library
Maybe clink a champagne toast
With a jazz age dancing queen
I was born too late to see Josephine Baker
Dancing in a Paris cabaret
Born too late to see Josephine Baker
She must have been great in her heyday
In black and white film you can't mistake her
She must have been great in her heyday
09 Fields of France (02:54)
His flying jacket still has her perfume
Memories of the night
Play across his mind
High above the fields of France
A single biplane in a clear blue sky
1917, no enemy was seen
High above the fields of France
Oh she looks
But there's nothing to see
Still she looks
Saying come back to me
He tells her just remember me this way
Fore here am I more true
Than anything I do
High above the fields of France
Oh she looks
Though he'll never come back
And the letter that came
Was bordered in black
She'll find somebody else
But not forget
Leaving her regrets
Like vapour trails of jets
High above the fields of France
10 Antarctica (04:08)
Long before I ever saw
The frost upon your face
I was haunted by your beauty
And it drew me to this place
I felt the chill of mystery
With one foot on your shore
And then and there resolved to go
Where no man had before
Maybe I was snowblind
But it seemed the wind spoke true
And I believed its stories then
As dreamers sometimes do
In Antarctica
In Antarctica
Who knows what the powers may be
That cause a man to go
Mindless of the dangers
Out across the virgin snow
Seduced by this ambition
I easily forget
The hopeless quest of Shackleton
The dreamlike death of Scott
In Antarctica
In Antarcita
Maybe I was snowblind
But it seemed the wind spoke true
And I believed its stories then
As dreamers sometimes do
In Antarctica
In Antarctica
Maybe I was snowblind
Perhaps it sapped my will
But something of my innocence
Is wandering there still
In Antarctica
In Antarctica
In Antarctica
In Antarctica
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