Artist:     Paul Kelly

Album:     Nature

Label:     Cooking Vinyl

Release Date:     10.12.18

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Communing with Paul Kelly’s Nature is good for the soul. Shaking his fist at his own mortality, the venerable Australian singer-songwriter, whose celebrated 2017 LP Life is Fine was the toast of the ARIA Awards and reached No. 1 in his home country, opens his new album by clothing Dylan Thomas’ poem “Death Shall Have No Dominion” in joyful, uplifting folk splendor, enhancing its dramatic power with a galvanizing, life-affirming spirit that channels Woody Guthrie.

The consummate song craftsman, shaping works of captivating beauty from seductive melodies, drifting hooks and graceful harmonies, Kelly has a way with other people’s words, as well as his own. On Nature, Kelly perfectly tailors the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Phillip Larkin, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman to tuneful folk-rock mystery and magic, brushing Larkin’s “The Trees” with light acoustic strum and letting it swim gently in a liquid pool of electric guitars, Farfisa organ and Mellotron, and Kelly’s lovely duet with Alice Keath. Imaginatively rearranging Section 32 of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” to drink deeply from similar dark, rippling waters, Kelly sinks into a resonant “With Animals” that creaks like an old wooden ship, and later slowly sweeps Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur” into a halting, amiable shuffle as it ponders the circle of life.

Flora and fauna, and how mankind relates to both, are of particular lyrical interest to Kelly on Nature. Ably backed by drummer Peter Luscombe, bassist Bill McDonald, guitarists Ash Naylor and Dan Kelly, and keyboardist Cameron Bruce, while also receiving vocal help from daughters Madeleine and Memphis, Kelly—seemingly always cognizant of Bob Dylan’s influence on him—circles above with lithe folky swoops in “Seagulls of Seattle” and conjures a grim, woodsy fairy tale for “Little Wolf,” where danger is omnipresent and there’s a choice between going it alone or running with a pack. Kelly chooses the latter in the record’s exhilarating first single, “With the One I Love,” as the full band coalesces brilliantly in a mighty, flowing current of starry, melodic rock that would break through any dam. Even more beguiling, “Bound to Follow (Aisling Song)” charms those spellbound by Kate Miller-Heidke’s siren vocals into otherworldly abstraction. Isn’t Nature wonderful?

—Peter Lindblad