On Graceland, 'Paul Simon's spirited, cross-cultural masterpiece. the singer-songwriter was "looking for a shot of redemption." Over the course of his brilliant solo career to that point. Simon had dutifully paraded his tangled emotions on the epics of despair Paul Simon and Still Crazy After All These Years, as well as on the slightly less constrained
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There Goes Rhymin' Simon and
Hearts and Bones. But on
Graceland, he showed a willingness to explore a world of ideas and feelings outside the labyrinthine complexity of his own psyche. Lifted to higher ground by the force of that album's lively South African grooves, the notorious pop fatalist found himself singing, "I've reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland." The feeling of transcendence was tangible.
The Rhythm of the Saints, Simon's first collection of new material in four years, extends his reach not only further into the riches of world-beat music but further into the realm of the spiritual. The idioms that drive the new record are the guitar stylings of West African pop and the ritual rhythms of candomblé, a syncretic Afro-Brazilian cult that formed in South America when West Africans were displaced there during the diaspora. Simon has taken the primitive, religious roots of this music as inspiration for a song cycle that examines with visionary beauty and brooding intensity the viability of faith in a corrupt, heartless and sometimes merely predictable world.
Graceland derived much of its buoyancy from the jumping township jive that Simon adopted, with relatively little revision, as its musical heart and soul. In this regard, The Rhythm of the Saints – a record that marries two distantly related world-beat forms into a vibrant, textured hybrid – is more the product of Simon's peerless studio craftsmanship. After recording the album's dramatic rhythm tracks in Brazil, Simon returned to New York, where he and Vincent Nguini, a Cameroon native, floated vivid, circular guitar patterns over the raw percussive cadences. Melodies, lyrics and pop-influenced arrangements rose out of repeated listenings to these bare-bones tracks as Simon shaped them into songs. The resultant sound is less joyously idiosyncratic than the energetic mbaqanga that fueled Graceland – there are fewer bounding bass lines and only discreet use of accordion – but no less arresting. If The Rhythm of the Saints lacks Graceland's relentless bounce, its somber and bright tones shift in ways that illuminate the album's intricate mosaic of dark and redemptive themes.
The album explodes into life with the thunderous drumming of Olodum, a tenman percussion group from Bahia, on "The Obvious Child," the opening track and first single. In that song Simon adopts the voice of an Everyman whose days have become defined by their limitations and dogged ordinariness. Confronted by his
