George Michael
Older

THE REVIEW

We find ourselves nearly at the threshold of Ferragosto: summer is in full swing and, along with it, the avalanche of sad and repulsive hits that radio and TV channels lovingly offer us: half-baked nickel songs made just to shake our rear ends long enough to complete the indulgences of August, performed by individuals of dubious provenance and morality, firmly intent on retreating back into the perpetual shadow of their "artistic" background once the fever of the trash-hit fades and the scorching summer temperatures give way to the chilly embrace of the Po Valley fog and the Triestine bora. We Italians, just to never deny our inclinations, are the eternal champions in consuming such garbage and, as soon as we cross the June solstice, here come the sales charts filled with pitiful pseudo-latin concoctions complete with pitiful accompanying clips.

Songs that are certainly making the masses of the Romagna Riviera and Versilia happy; however, for those who remain rigid and impassive in the shade of city sycamores or anxiously await delayed departures, the truzzo-dance or Spanish-Brazilian moves are (perhaps) not quite suitable for their non-vacationer state. It often happens (at least for the undersigned) to want to break free from contemporary trends and, whether out of nostalgia or melancholy for times gone by, to seek some sound, some artist, some track, some album that reeks of mothballs and past glories.

"Older", dated 1996, probably represents the last great hallmark of George Michael's discography before the explosion of sex scandals and the recent substance abuse: a work that was dutifully meant to inherit the massive weight of "Faith" and the more modest reception of "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" and took on the daunting task of getting the career of one of the most notable eighties remnants stranded among the new pop mainstream recruits back on track. With this third studio album, Michael temporarily shelved both the carefree funky vein of the Wham! era and the Christian rocker look of "Faith" in order to conceive a refined resume of jazz, lounge, organic, ethnic, and ambient sounds mixed together with a delightful R&B-pop mood: except for a few sporadic frivolous dance hints, most of the tracks are deeply infused with calm, subdued, relaxed, even ascetic and "spiritual" atmospheres, all shaping a multi-faceted and composite tracklist in its brief yet intense moments of radiant reflection.

The debut of "Older" is almost dialectically divided: on one side, the famous soft-melodic and tearful ballad Jesus To A Child, dense with "parabolic" strings, painful passion, and exacerbated emotion in the style of Careless Whisper, on the other, the danceable flavor as well as lounge/jazz-inspired of FastLove that seems regrettably to betray the softness invoked by the debut, yet determined to resurrect with orchestral/instrumental carousels of retro-jazz influences in the title track Older and You Have Been Loved.

With the gloomy The Strangest Thing, the omnipresent lightness temporarily abdicates the trump of instrumental tracks arriving at a valid trance-lounge experiment enriched with ethnic-oriental sounds that, however, cannot supplant the eternal jazz-soul triumph of the ultra-soft Spinning The Wheel or the "old school" It Doesn't Really Matter and Move On. To conclude the dances (naturally in a figurative sense), the friendly funky-gospel hints of Star People and the almost entirely instrumental Free, a sort of revised and corrected reprise of The Strangest Thing sounds.

Here you go, dear debaseriani, a completely different summer musical recipe from contemporary wigglings, suitable for any afternoon spent lazily napping on a hammock and thinking about the photo album that in these three months of heatwaves and popsicles could not be filled as desired.

George Michael, "Older"

Jesus To A Child - FastLove - Older - Spinning The Wheel - It Doesn't Really Matter - To Be Forgiven - Move On - Star People - You Have Been Loved - Free