Step back with a vintage voice
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Third album … Scottish singer Paolo Nutini has just released Caustic Love.
Source: News Limited
Caustic Love — Paolo Nutini [Warner]
Rating: 4 stars
Sounds like: The kind of album they used to make
In a word: Real
FUN fact: Denise Drysdale is one of Scottish singer Paolo Nutini’s biggest local fans.
Like most of Australia, Ding Dong didn’t rely on our radio, who have found Nutini’s singles too misshapen to pigeonhole and his voice not polished (read autotuned) enough.
Stumbling over him, Denise experienced love at first listen.
Nutini’s belated third album is his most mature, most soulful, most retro and most lovable.
There’s a remarkable song here called Iron Sky that provides six minutes of musical goosebumps. Nutini, who wears a recent long-term break up on his raw vocal chords, exorcises his lyrics over a modern soul backdrop that marries Massive Attack to Sly Stone. There’s strings, there’s brass and there’s even a sample of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘you are not machines’ dialogue from his film The Great Dictator.
Better Man flashes back to Nutini’s buskery beginnings, but soon morphs into the kind of gorgeous, warm ballad George Harrison was always trying to shoehorn onto Beatles albums. Heads up men of Australia, this is a wedding song in waiting, positively bursting with lyrical brownie points.
Scream (Funk My Life Up) is more James Brown than Aloe Blacc, Let Me Down Easy samples vintage soul queen Bettye LaVette while Janelle Monae guests on funk workout Fashion. Someone Like You goes doo wop, because he can.
And when Nutini lets his voice soar free, on retro gem One Day or the stunning slow burner Diana, it creates pure joy.
If you want Bill Withers over Pitbull, Bob Marley over Pharrell and like your music real — like Ding Dong — then explore the raw power and pure passion of Paolo Nutini.
