Mike Scott is releasing his records with even greater speed: a Waterboys album is released almost every year. Nobody can write that many good songs. Scott sometimes plays Hendrix and has discovered the electronic loop as a rhythmic vehicle for his rhapsodies. That’s why his invocations in the characteristic chant now sound like Van Morrison interpreting Schiller (not Friedrich), or like New Model Army declaiming Yeats.
Scott is never at a loss for kitsch
It roars, it roars, it rumbles. In the lurching Philippika, “The Liar,” Scott shouts indignantly through a whisper bag and is interrupted by “Breaking News”: Civilization Criticism from Roger Waters’ Grabbeltisch. So it’s actually quite horrifying at times. Mike Scott whispers, he pities, he revels as he has for forty years. His mere voice with any music makes stones weep. In “In My Dreams” he summons Sly Stone, King Crimson, and Amy Winehouse just as he used to summon Patti Smith and Lou Reed.
“The Southern Moon” and a “Blackberry Girl” are good for him for eloquent odes. “Hollywood Blues” is the one sentimental track from this record that would be included in an expanded Mike Scott collection were it not for the 124 songs from the “Fisherman’s Blues” period. Scott is never at a loss for kitsch. “When Dixie is playing, we all come marching in,” he sings in “Once Were Brothers.” Yearning choirs, sloppy guitar solo. In an over-the-top funfair song, he announces the Whitesnake slogan “Here We Go Again”.
Eight songs set the stage for the one piece Scott actually wanted to write: “Passing Through,” a leisurely nine-minute Irish pub talking-blues-meditation complete with sing-along chorus, evidently inspired by Leonard Cohen. Scott sings about the topos he is always concerned with: the transcendence of existence. “Sometimes happy, sometimes blue/ We’re only passing through.” That’s how it looks.
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