plorentz's Full Review: 12 Songs (Special Edition) [Digipak] by Neil Diamo...
Neil Diamond's latest album, which comes with the pointedly simple title 12 Songs, represents that precise moment in the venerated performer's career when he ceases to be Mom's favorite singer, and becomes her college age son's latest musical infatuation. No longer the voice that lends soulful, sequined elevation to a housewife's million mundane chores, 12 Songs is destined to accompany late night study sessions, reading Camus and drinking really cheap beer (this in spite of Diamond's incongruously chipper worldview). The duly noted Rick Rubin production credit (engineer of the late-90s Johnny Cash revival), heralded on the promo sticker on the album's plastic wrapping fairly warns cooler-than-thou record store employees everywhere that it is now not only acceptable, but indeed, imperative to give this man in-store play - hold the irony.
It's like we try to tell Stewart when he gets himself into trouble. Dude, you're not a bad person. You just made a bad choice. In Neil's case, it's not that he was ever uncool. Quite the contrary, Neil Diamond has always been super-duper-cool, as scores (or at least half-dozens) of indie rock cover versions (not to mention the entire Crooked Fingers catalog, into which 12 Songs would seem to fit just fine) can attest. But he has made a lot of uncool music. Oh yes, I once had a 45 of his 1983 hit "Heartlight", and that's a tough song to forgive. And don't get me started on all those sequins. But, with this album, he rights all those wrongs elegantly, delivering songs that could only have come out of age and success with all the matter-of-fact, it's-only-rock-n-roll energy of his earliest records. And though the songs may be slow, they are strikingly ungloomy.
In a less controlled setting, in less capable hands, Diamond's boundless, self-reflective positivity, his unrelenting sincerity (set to big string arrangements with flocks of back-up singers) would be (and has been) nauseatingly corny. To his, and Rubin's credit, the primary strength of 12 Songs is the album's sense of discipline and understatement. So that when, at the apex of the album's second track, "Hell Yeah" (essentially a folk-rock "We are the Champions"), Diamond sings out with triumphant abandon about how great his life is, it feels earthy and real, and even conversational.
Like Paul McCartney's latest album, 12 Songs is a great example of how a braver, skilled producer can find challenges for artists who haven't had anything to prove to their audiences for years, pushing them to perform as if they were just starting out in the biz, if only, as Diamond jokingly complains in his liner notes to this record, by making them actually play their own guitars. Rubin records Diamond's picking and strumming and singing, all in super-close-up, so that listening as he plays the most intimate of these songs - the sweetly lilting opener "Oh Mary", or the darker, jazzy "I'm On To You", or the bitterly confrontational "Face Me" - it feels like the two of us could be sitting on the same couch, in the same room, breathing each other's air. Even on tracks with the more epic production - like "Evermore", whose massive horn arrangements recall "I Am, I Said" - we hear his fingers sliding over every bump of his lower guitar strings, we're privy to the mechanics of every chord change. When he takes a breath, we hear it, and at times, you'd swear you hear his toe tapping out the beat, like a junior guitar student, curled around his instrument, working diligently through a particularly difficult study.
But, when Diamond sings, he becomes the teacher, a virtual compendium of life lessons which he delivers with a laid-back modesty, barely singing some verses, tossing off rhymes as if they were nothing special. Still, as evidenced by the fabulous "Delirious Love" (reprised as a bonus track with ultra-nifty back-up vocals by Brian Wilson), the dude knows how to throw down those scrappy rock n' roll rhythms he built his brand on in the mid-late-60s. But the only time the album ever sounds truly nostalgic is on "Save Me a Saturday Night", which recycles a classic bubblegum chord progression (think "Angel of the Morning" or "Hang on Sloopy") in service of a yearning, elementary love song.
Neil Diamond's artistic renaissance has been in progress for well over a decade now, but 12 Songs represents to me exactly the kind of record he's been dying to make. With few commercial or critical considerations to worry about, Neil and Rick and their small assemblage of veteran studio hands (including Benmont Tench, Larry Knechtel, and Billy Preston, former Rubin protege Jonny Polonsky, and Roger Manning, Jr. of Jellyfish) come up with the purest kind of rock record - one utterly devoid of irony or artifice, or as Diamond himself asserts: "only the heart of them remains." At the tender age of 64, and after a 40-plus year recording career which saw him filling stadiums year-after-year even when we wasn't topping the pop charts, Diamond's music finally, once again, reflects nothing but his passion for song. On 12 Songs, Neil Diamond has become an indie-rocker in the truest sense.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"12 Songs" by Neil Diamond
Columbia Records
Released 11/8/05
Produced by Rick Rubin
57 min.
SONGS: Oh Mary - Hell Yeah - Captain of a Shipwreck - Evermore - Save Me a Saturday Night - Delirious Love - I'm On To You - What's It Gonna Be - Man of God - Create Me - Face Me - We /BONUS: Men Are So Easy - Delirious Love (w/ Brian Wilson)
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