Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Joe Jackson is one of those incredible musicians and lyric writers that make the sound of the autobiographical so human, so very obviously in love with what it means to bare the soul through the dedication to the observation of each word and how it works with emotion, memory, and the pleasure of the listener’s attention…it is the poet within the art, the eyewitness to history’s personal unfolding, and all within the boundaries of Hope And Fury, beyond the limitations set by other’s unmeasured mind.

It is in the brand new album by the artist that such things once more reveal themselves, the sense of timing, the willingness to explore the introspective of what is a cascade of characters in the small seaside setting, and the deeply personal affection he portrays and offers to each of them, whether in minute detail, or in the unfurling of attraction, the sense of the acerbic and gentle melding with seamless precision.

Hope And Fury utilises the enormous talent of Graham Maby, Teddy Kumpel, Doug Yowell, Paulo Stagnaro, Susan Aquila, and Lourdes Rosales with a kind of adoring speciality, of powering the emotion as a chorus of immersive attendees, adding flavour and insight to tracks such as Made God Laugh, Fabulous People, the superb After All This Time, the longing to be found, never exploited in See You In September, and the opening drive and the scene setter of Welcome To Burning-By-Sea with incredible precision.

Produced by Joe Jackson and Patrick Dillett, the album has the exactness of poetry, the imagery of anger grappling with serenity in a fierce converse of British understatement is to be admired, defended, and revelled in, as one would if offered the opportunity to spend a day in the intoxicating vigour of the sounds, sights, and memories of the long lost seaside experience, somewhere between Brighton Rock and Break In The Sun but with that earnest, infectious smile that joins the dots on each musical moment of cool that thrill the senses.

Ian D. Hall