Read over 170 more reviews in Issue #116

‘Violence Insane’, originally intended for a video game, is a fantastically nasty track about murder and Taylor distorts his voice to brilliant effect on what is easily the darkest, heaviest song he’s ever laid down. This is counteracted by ‘What Really Matters’, a gentle tune about the importance of kindness as you get older.

‘Don’t Photograph Food’ is a fun, humorous rocker in the vein of ‘I Am A Drummer (In A Rock ‘N’ Roll Band), poking fun at social media via a mostly spoken vocal line. He then sings a lovely song for his wife via ‘I See You Now’, a typical Taylor composition that could easily have fitted on his previous two solo albums.

At this point the album starts to dip. ‘Chump’ heavily criticises Donald Trump, which will either elate or enrage depending on your political stance. However, unlike ‘Dear Mr Murdoch’ which was a fully fleshed out track, this has very sparse instrumentation consisting just of synth pads and barely qualifies as a song. ‘Spit In Your Eye’ repairs some of the damage, being another pleasant mid-paced tune that would have been at home on ‘Outsider’. This is followed by a cover of ‘Jealous Guy’ which is competently done, but if you saw the live version he did with Jools Holland where it was just piano and vocal, I felt that rendition was stronger.

Then we have the lead single, ‘Come On Summer (It’s Party Time)’. I was wholly unimpressed by this repetitive, samba influenced track which sees Taylor only sing a handful of lines before letting the Ndlovu choir take the rest, while he just repeats “Come on summer’ for the remainder of the song's six-minute duration.

The album then concludes with ‘A Great Big Beautiful World’, a reworking of the opening track, but infuriatingly Taylor simply says “don’t fuck it up” repeatedly while the African choir wail away for six and a half minutes. That means over thirteen minutes of the album features the choir singing.

As he is one of my favourite artists, this decision makes me feel short changed. I don’t look forward to a Roger Taylor album hoping a quarter of it is handed over to the Ndlovu Youth Choir. I think three songs with them on is frankly two too many. Combine that with the final track being an inferior reworking of the opener, the throwaway single, the amount of processed or spoken vocals and the bare musicality of ‘Chump’, and the result is a real loss of momentum after a strong start.