So Beautiful or So What

The music is the mild, irregular folk-rock he's explored for decades, graced with global colors that sound as natural as that guitar.

So Beautiful or So What is vintage Simon, but it's also all over the map stylistically, touching on blues, African, folk, Indian and more. The music is unmistakably his, but finds the artist challenging himself melodically and with his phrasing.

Decades beyond the point at which most of his peers peaked, Paul Simon is still discovering new ways of writing and conveying amazing work and discovering beautifully unexpected and often spiritual language, as well as new rhythms, melodies and instrumental textures.

It'd be inapt to say that Simon's latest, So Beautiful Or So What, finds the 69-year-old in a more creatively fruitful place than he's been in 20 years.

The worldy influence remains but never overwhelms and the album contains at least half a dozen songs that are as simple and profound as anything Simon has ever written.

Driven by Simon's uniquely percussive acoustic guitar, and with his world music leanings embedded naturally rather than overtly, this beguiling album shows him to have lost none of his ability for finding universal truths within the guise of introspection. It's a profound statement from a master of his craft.

It may be less exuberant and therefore harder to love at first, but it delivers the goods just as surely. And with Paul Simon now old enough to face the ultimate questions and to do so with a stunning musical sophistication, it may just be a complete classic.

He's merely living in his time and reporting, returning with an album that's vivid, vibrant, and current in a way none of his peers have managed to achieve.

Abandoning "another album with a rhythmic premise" according to So Beautiful's deluxe edition DVD, Paul Simon nevertheless injects echoes of Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints in "Dazzling Blue" and "Love Is Eternal Sacred Light," respectively, feeding their author's master class mixtape of varied musical mattes (the Moby-like spiritual sampling on "Getting Ready for Christmas Day") like There Goes Rhymin' Simon and Still Crazy After All These Years.

For Simon, the divine isn't in the persistent hook of pop music but in the most far-reaching of global folk, where sounds, structures and techniques long ago abandoned can be employed in the service of something new and unknown.

This cagey old pro makes room for stray nonsense phrases like "bop-bop-a-whoa" as well; spirited spirituality is his goal these days.

Simon's openness and spirit of inquiry ensure that So Beautiful Or So What is never the work of a man slouched in complacency.

So beautiful Or So What is a deeply spiritual record, its more reflective moments offset by playful fare. [may 2011, p.106]

There is something especially poignant and inspired about his 12th studio album.

According to Paul Simon, his new album So Beautiful Or So What is the best work he has done in decades. That's a bold proclamation. Even more startling: it's not hyperbole.

As it is, we have a definite return to consistency, if not form, and a Paul Simon as simultaneously hermetic and engaged as only he can be.

A new Paul Simon record is predictable in the most comforting of ways: gentle world music affiliations, keen narrative, righteous guitar work, effortless vibe. Though his voice retains its coy, boyish charm from 40 years ago, Simon's gift for melody has now been superseded by a knack for rich texture and complex rhythm.

As ever, Simon's work is a strange mix of easy and uneasy listening--it's balm, but it leaves an itch. [May 2011, p.74]

He's not preaching on this album. He's finding solace, fleeting and fragmentary, and every springy guitar lick is its own benediction.

It's his best album since 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints, and it also sums up much of what makes Simon great.

He approaches it with a light touch and a skip in his stride. He turns the metaphysical into a series of narratives tinged not just with poignance but humor and groove.