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Randy Newman may take his time recording an album, but nobody can fault his sense of timing. It's been 9 years since his last collection, Bad Love, but as befits a man who's at his best when he turns his beady eye on the absurdities and injustices of the world, he releases Harps & Angels just as the planet seems to be going to hell in a handcart.
He may be better known for his film soundtrack work these days, but Newman is at his considerable best when penning his satirical vignettes. It's a sound that probably won't be to everyone's taste - Dixieland jazz and honky tonk piano are very much to the forefront - but his eye is as sharp as ever.
Vast chunks of Harps & Angels are about the state of America today in its post-Bush, pre-Obama era. Yet this is no po-faced, finger-wagging posturing. Newman's considerable skill is to brilliantly write lyrics that make you think as well as being laugh out loud funny.
Take Piece Of The Pie for instance. which brilliantly skewers the American Dream with lines like "You say you're working harder than you ever have, you say you got two jobs and so's your wife / Living in the richest country in the world, wouldn't you think you'd have a better life" before mocking 'socially aware' rock stars - "Bono's off in Africa, he's never around, the country turns its lonely eyes to who? Jackson Browne".
There's also the hysterical funny Korean Parents, which looks at the white 'slacker' generation and concludes they'd be better off being raised by Koreans ("Look at the numbers, that's all I ask - who's at the head of every class?"). In an echo of the storm over Rednecks over 30 years ago, Newman's already been accused of racism here, but surely only someone with an irony bypass could be offended.
The album's centrepiece though is the superb A Few Words In Defence Of Our Country which takes a look at the Bush administration and concludes that "the leaders we have, while they're the worst that we've had, are hardly the worst this poor world has ever seen". As epitaphs go, "Bush - better than Stalin or Hitler" probably isn't what Dubya would want on his gravestone. Newman doesn't stop there, taking well-aimed barbs at the Supreme Court and the War On Terror - "A President once said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself' Now it seems like we're supposed to be afraid, it's patriotic in fact and colour coded".
As ever, it's not just politics that's in Newman's sights. Only A Girl is in his fine tradition of character studies, concerning an ageing lothario seduced by a young gold-digger ("maybe it's the money...damn, I never thought of that..."), while Potholes is another spot-on satire about men's views on women - "I even love my teenage daughter, apparently I don't care how I'm treated, my love is unconditional or something".
Yet just as you've got Newman penned as a die-hard cynic, he steps in and breaks your heart with two straight love songs. Losing You is a sad and tender account of heartbreak, while the closing Feels Like Home (one of Newman's old songs, re-recorded here) is just beautiful and irony-free love song that's been covered by both Bonnie Raitt and Chantel Kreviazuk, but rendered definitive here by Newman.
It's heartening to know that, at nearly 65, Randy Newman is as sharp and incisive as he's ever been. It's impossible to compare him to anyone else for he's in a league of his own. Harps And Angels is another reminder of one of America's most under-rated songwriter's immense talent.
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