I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Paul Weller ever since he split The Jam up. Apart from a handful of songs (and at least one of those is a re-recorded Jam demo!) you can keep the Style Council thank you very much. I loved his first 3 or 4 solo albums but after “Heavy Soul” his records have been so hit and miss I really don’t care for more than one or sometimes two tracks from each. I have a soft spot for “22 Dreams” and “Sonik Kicks” but since then his records have been so increasingly lacklustre I haven’t listened to a new release since “True Meanings” in 2018. If you’re not gonna make the effort Paul then I can’t be arsed either.

As I’m a bit of a nerd and I love a list I’ve got all my records catalogued online, on not one one but two websites, on one of which you can put a score out of 10 for each track. 8’s, 9’s and 10’s are to me damn near or actually perfect, a 7 means it’s OK, nothing special just what you'd expect, 5’s and 6’s are just “meh”, they’re just there and anything under 5 well you may as well not have bothered recording it. “A Kind Revolution” has a couple of 6’s and everything else at 5 (and that’s being very lenient to one or two of them)…meh.

When I looked at the track list before starting to write this the only track title I could mentally put a tune to was “Woo Sé Mama” and that only because I think it’s bloody awful (yet it still somehow manages to be one of the two better songs on here) ! Maybe he needs an editor as it seems like he keeps releasing almost anything he records without any time to consider “is this any good ?”. Maybe he needs to work with different people who can drag something else out of him. I don’t know but it’s a great pity to me that I no longer get excited about this guy, who soundtracked my teenage years, announcing a new tour or record. I live in hope that the fire hasn’t really gone out and he’ll make a blinding record one day but I fear that those days are far, far behind him.

Hopper - https://youtu.be/V4pJMn053Wk?si=BBcxDflcU4SCnXmK