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Rating: Much more emblematic and significant than its artistic value and expressed content might suggest: "Breaking Hearts" from 1984, the eighteenth studio album by Reginald Kenneth Dwight. In the four preceding records, our artist found relative artistic tranquility and creative prosperity, settling into well-made pop and managing to compose little masterpieces unfortunately little recognized like "Sartorial Eloquence," "Just Like Belgium," "All Quiet On The Western Front," or "One More Arrow," to name a few. In the next two, he would crash terribly; crushed by his vices and incapable of recovering the style and inspiration that had made him unique, with "Nikita" as the only noteworthy song. The tormented "Breaking Hearts," which sits right in between these two periods, is the ultimate transition album in EJ's career: 10 songs that follow one another without an apparent logical thread, divided between the utter inconsistency and futility and the innate talent of a pop music genius still capable of hitting the mark before the darkest crisis of his artistic journey.
Certainly, the first approach with "Breaking Hearts" is one that strikes, but not positively: "Restless" and "Who Wears These Shoes," faded easy-rock with a funky aftertaste with neither head nor tail, plastic songs, in short, that fail to convey anything pleasant, and even more energetic pieces like "Slow Down Georgie," "Lil' Frigerator," and "Did He Shoot Her?" don't fully convince, resulting little more than a glossy, anonymous, and lacking in bite copy of EJ's more rock side, which in the previous decade managed to express itself at much higher levels. But "Breaking Hearts," as I already said, isn't just the album of the poverty and lighthearted melancholy of the above-mentioned songs; Elton John is still capable of inventing something original and enjoyable, like the indolent, sunny, and subtly ironic calypso swing of "Passengers," for which a fun music video was shot, and the closing "Sad Songs (Says So Much)," the only example in the entire album where backing vocals and synthesizers manage to complement a truly catchy and enjoyable song. Nothing exceptional but definitely above the average of this controversial album, and it's especially in the ballads, where he doesn't attempt to sound forcibly cheerful and à la page, that our artist manages to give his best, as shown by the soft and vaguely melodramatic title track "Breaking Hearts (Ain't What It Used To Be)" and especially "In Neon," an elegant and pleasant ballad with a bittersweet, self-ironic, and distinctly autobiographical flavor, in which EJ allows himself the luxury of quoting himself by reviving the opening of "Roy Rogers"; thus reaching excellent levels that wouldn't be touched again in the subsequent four years, firing his last arrows before the collapse.
And so "Breaking Hearts," this album that doesn't even rank among the top twenty composed by Elton John, lacking a precise identity and half to be judged without appeal, instead reveals itself as a unique episode in our artist's discography, who had never shown himself so Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in a single album. But, after all, this is the ultimate transition album, the album of an artist "on the razor's edge," on the brink of the abyss, and this peculiarity is what gives "Breaking Hearts" a value and a reason to be remembered, albeit more in historical than musical and artistic terms.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
01 Restless (05:16)
Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
It's a hot summer night in the blackboard jungle
Crime sits heavy on the city shoulder
Can't get no work, I can't get a job
I just sit and play my radio in the parking lot
Well they're breaking down doors in foreign countries
Everybody thinks somebody's hiding something
There's talk on the street and the nation is worried
But you can't talk back when you're dead, when you're dead and
buried
And Everybody's restless
Everybody's scared
Everybody's looking for something that just ain't there
Everybody's restless
Everybody's scared, they think we're all in danger
Everyone's taking cover from someone else's anger
The walls have ears, Big Brother's watching
They tell us that we're poisoned from everything that we're
touching
Well we could be children from the way we're acting
We feed ourselves lies and then we scream for action
We just breed and we lose our nerve
And there's bombs going off in every corner of the world
05 Li'l 'Frigerator (03:25)
Music by Elton John
Lyrics by Bernie Taupin
She looked so easy 'cause she looked so young
With a geisha smile made in Taiwan
She got cherry bombs inside her eyes
And the luck of the Irish on her side
Don't let her tell you that she loves your mind
She's got her price, she can turn on a dime
Those crocodile tears ain't tears of pain
Look a little closer, that's acid rain
And I don't know
Why li'l frigerator you're so cold
Go li'l frigerator go
Get away from my soul
Li'l frigerator you're so cold
She's calculated with the kiss of death
Got a digital mind and expensive breath
She's an empty shell, you're a piece of meat
Just another statistic on her readout sheet
06 Passengers (03:24)
Deny the passenger, who want to get on
Deny the passenger, who want to get on
Deny the passenger, who want to get on
Want to get on
He want to get on
Want to get on
He want to get on
To make a chain of fools
You need a matching pair
One hypocritical fool
And a crowd that's never there
There's anger in the silence
There's wheels upon the jail
A black train built of bones
On a copper rail
Company conductor
You need the salt of tears
Falling on a ticket
That no one's used in years
Non-commercial native
It's tattooed in your veins
You're living in a blood bank
And riding on this train
The spirit's free, but you always find
Passengers stand and wait in line
Someone in front and someone else behind
But passengers always wait in line
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