Here's to the noughties, Mrs. Robinson. Or should I say the 1990s: Paul Simon has arrived at his rock 'n' roll contemporaries' midlife crisis a decade or so late, and not in the good, fashionable way. As the 20th century wound down, elder statesmen such as Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and Eric Clapton dabbled in newfangled electronica-- and whippersnapper David Gray sold six million before Bob Dylan could contemplate following suit. At the time, Simon was busy flopping a musical, 1997's The Capeman, and prepping 2000 safety-move You're the One. On Surprise, Simon & Garfunkel's better half signs up an, ahem, hot young knob-twiddler-- 57-year-old Brian Eno-- to handle "sonic landscape" (haw haw actual liner note!) on half-formed tone poems that live down to the self-absorbed, vapidly mystic, utterly clueless conception of Baby Boomers one sees in TV commercials.
It appears Simon is still narcissistic after all these years. While that's not inherently bad, here it's ill-advised. Surprise drowns in signifiers of experimentalism-- wobbly U2 electric guitars, drones, whizzes, and oh-em-gee programmed beats-- that already sounded stale when "electro-folk" was actually a fad. Meanwhile, when Simon isn't probing the mysteries of aging, he's singing about his own writer's block. "Locked in a struggle for the right combination of words in a melody line," he begins on "Everything About It Is a Love Song". On "Sure Don't Feel Like Love", Simon waxes even more meta-- "Thing about the second line?"-- but clunky thing about it really is that "the poet" just rhymed "school" and "fool" in two straight songs, and his one-man band's busy textures can't fully distract from insipid songwriting. Even Simon's welcome bursts of wry humor are self-centered: "I'm paintin' my hair the color of mud," he Jason Mraz drawl-raps on outrageously unfunky "Outrageous". Eno is Simon's Just for Men.
Narcissism, it turns out, is just the metaphysical underpinning for a bunch of post-hippie New Age nonsense. "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?" Simon repeats on "Outrageous". The answer? God. Oh. Raga-like "Beautiful" describes adopting children from Bangladesh, China, and Kosovo. They're beautiful. Proggy "Wartime Prayers" goes mealy-mouthed political, its gussied-up choir a weak contrast to Neil Young's impassioned legions on the recent Living With War, while "Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean" shows off Simon's knack for huge, simple metaphors before stumbling on adolescent wordplay: "Nothing is different, but everything has changed". Wait, wasn't that a Ben Lee electro-folk song? Opener "Why Do You Live in the Northeast" says we're all the same, even if some of us eat rice, and poses another rhetorical Q: "If the answer is infinite light, why do we live in the dark?" Here I'm still trying to figure out if the theater's really dead.
Given how much recent indie pop owes to Simon, he probably coulda cleaned up with a Rick Rubin nostalgia treatment. It'd be kinda neat that he didn't-- if the results weren't so vainglorious. "I don't pretend that I'm a mastermind with a genius marketing plan," Simon sermonizes. Closer "Father and Daughter" is the most conventionally light-jazzy thing here-- the only track without an Eno-scape, it originally appeared on The Wild Thornberrys soundtrack. And while it's better than, say, Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses" it won't replace "Daughters" as daddy/daughter wedding dance. Still, pulsating runaway tale "Another Galaxy", with the album's finest melody, shows Simon's compass hasn't totally slip-slid yet.
Contractually mandated "surprise" pun: In the end, Eno really isn't one. Talking Heads' 1980 Remain in Light owed as much to African polyrhythms as Simon's wildly successful Graceland did six years later. Moreover, Simon has always changed trappings from album to album, bringing on Nile Rodgers and Philip Glass for 1983's underrated Hearts and Bones and looking to Brazil for 1990's Rhythm of the Saints. But while a trendy folk-rock arrangement initially made "The Sound of Silence" a hit, memorable songs made Simon & Garfunkel worthwhile. On Surprise, Simon neglects his strengths, and the record's Plastic Eno Band mud paint can't bring them back.
