Wild Wood (1994)

The thing I love about this album, possibly more than anything else (and Sunflower is a cracker of a tune, there is a lot to love here) is how much Wild Wood evokes 70s mainstays like Crosby, Stills and Nash, Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, Traffic... there's a dad joke here, and since a ridiculous number of Jam and TSC albums have dad joke names like "All Mod Cons", I'm just going to go for it: "Wild Wood? More like Winwood, amirite? Maybe it's just me, but I love Steve Winwood, and these songs remind me of Traffic or Blind Faith, and in a really good way.

The title track is deceptively simple, bittersweet, but never losing a sense of optimistic regret. But then it rhymes "justice" with "trust in", and it conjurs up Neil Young's Harvest Moon, and then it's paired with an instrumental which is nothing more an nothing less than a delicious two minute jam session, with a saxophone blessed wind down. I feel like Wild Wood is what Weller set out to accomplish with the Style Council. I have seen reviews which describe Wild Wood as not straying far from the ground that he was breaking with the Style Council, but I prefer to consider that perhaps this was an inevitable destination.

In much the same way I love Steve Winwood's organ playing on Talk Talk's Colour of Spring, I dig Mick Talbot's organs on "5th Season". Another song I immediately added to my playlist. Good for the soul.

And have I mentioned how much I love Steve White's drums? With every single album, he gets smoother. He reminds me a bit of Andy Newmark, technically perfect, technically ambitious with a complete absence of show-boating; but there are also several songs here that bring to mind that second Stone Roses album. Wild Wood gives these songs more room to breathe than Weller's self-titled album. I added "All The Pictures On The Wall" to my playlist as soon as I heard it. It's just perfect. I just love the way the lyrics alternate between an empty room, static pictures on a wall, and a clock that just keeps ticking away time. But again, the drums and bass here capture all of that mood perfectly. This is just a great rock album. There are moments when the Jam came off as pretentious; and there were moments when the Style Council didn't.

Wild Wood is never pretentious. It's neither more nor less than it tries to be. Captures a fleeting moment like a butterfly in a net, and then sets it free again. Really beautiful.