Ringo Starr - Liverpool 8
Liverpool 8 is Ringo Starr's fourteenth studio album. It's been two years since his previous effort, but those two years seemed to loosen Starr's grip on the Beatle inside him. All 13 of Ringo's previous studio albums exhibited some sort of Beatle's-esque influence, but Liverpool 8 is somewhat of a new beginning.
Kicking off this album is the title track, which has the feel of a song you'd expect to hear at the end of an album. "Liverpool 8" is a goodbye song, reminiscent of days spent rocking "with George and Paul/and my friend John" as well as a reference to Rory Storm (lead vocalist in one of Ringo's pre-Beatles bands, Raving Texans), and is decorated with endearing thoughts of his hometown that clearly influenced a reluctance to leave ("Destiny was calling/I just couldn't stick around/Liverpool I left you/but I never let you down"). I take this as an almost journal-like personal work of Ringo's; you would need to read a biography in order to fully understand every reference in this track.
From there, Starr seems to experiment with several different styles of musicality, my only complaint being that it sounds so intentional. For instance: "Think About You" and "For Love" are pretty solid blues/rock tracks, "Gone Are The Days" is heavily influenced by Indian music, making it sound like a track from Ian Brown's Solarized, "Harry's Song" sounding like a cross between a southern honky-tonk worthy piece crossed with a march-like variety show entry (that is not as bad as it sounds), "Pasadobles" being strongly influenced by Spanish music, so on and so forth.
The concept is good, as it exemplifies Ringo's long-overdue break from the Beatles motif. However, the layout could do for a bit more subtlety. Track after track makes jumps between styling: "If It's Love That You Want"'s Duran Duran-esque 80's rock/southern fusion setup to the low-fi, indie-rock love song sound of "Love is", to the record-closer "R U Ready?" which sounds like a bluegrass band accompanying a group of working slaves singing a spiritual.
The influence the Beatles had on virtually all music post-1963 was seismic, but it's refreshing to see Ringo Starr break free of that stranglehold, despite the fact that his fourteen album solo career falls low on the radar for a member of such a monolithic band.
The vocals are clean. The musicality is clean. It's a solid record. A lack of cohesiveness keeps it from being a great album, but it's certainly a very good collection of songs.
6.5 out of 10
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