Q, the music bible with which Eyewear likes to quibble, recently suggested that Simple Minds was a guilty pleasure.They are not. Their album, New Gold Dream, is a shimmering masterpiece of new wave iconography from about a quarter century ago: from signal cover to its deeply-crafted songs that hint at Christology by way of Bonhoeffer, and still calls for attentive recovery. It is now time to establish it as a recognized classic.
It is a wonder, all of a piece, this transcendent album, full of Kerr's whispers and new, resonant sounds. Each song builds on a crashing wave of revealed theology and subtle synth-sound - from the alliterative call-and-response of "someone somewhere in summertime" to the promised miracles, to the dark-night-of-the-soul doubt of "Big Sleep" to the redemptive, eschatoligical fervour that is the bold title track's luscious line: "she is your friend" (that wondrous promise still makes me swoon - oh to hold her hand).
Each song relates to the soul's journey toward faith - sometimes pulling back, sometimes entering in - and does so, in true metaphysical fashion, and in the English tradition, by marrying the secular and the divine in the body of one beloved. So it is that track 2 has the love-struck Catherine figured as a fireworks display as "Catherine wheels" in her fear of falling "in love / out of the sky" - fusing pagan and Christian imagery with Eros. The titles are themselves wonderful. "Glittering Prize" for instance.
Blending allegories from Auerbach, of sun-struck summer wheatfields, to burning youths, souls and hearts ablaze, Christ figured as the ideal teen girlfriend, the redemption songs on this album stay ever-golden, luminous and sublime, gently reminscent of the Gawain-Poet's search for Pearl. Images of friendship, light, and heraldry interpenetrate each song. Consider the song "Hunter and the Hunted" which is strongly reflective of Wyatt.
Throughout this brilliant god-haunted, love-shaped album, the well-written and considered lyrics refer, back to traditions of religious poetry and other writings (including of course the Bible), and forward, to a millenial possibility flaring on the edge of perception. A tense, compassionate struggle is endorsed in these songs, between earthly and heavenly love - in other words, the original pop tropes are cleverly, seriously, redeemed.
Critics - of music and poetry - often mock the adolescent sublime, when works of art and wonder are first encountered, and the soul shouts out to what it hopes is best ahead in the summer heat of foolhardy but heroic decision - but doubters should heed youth's aesthetic call; not all encountered when young is silly or sentimental only.
Much in the green fires of youth still burns within us years later, and can lead one home at the end of our days. I first heard NGD in the spring of my fifteenth year, as the winter ice cracked under the bright blue winter sky, and it remains a constant counterpoint to this less romantic era. We need to listen with more heart, and Hart (Crane), somewhere, sometimes ("speeding through the eye of love").
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