THE REAL MACAW Graham Parker Arista

By J.D. Considine

Marriage seems to have done well by Graham Parker. On this, his first album since wedding his "Jolie Jolie," he sounds confident and assured - in better form, in fact, than on either Squeezing Out Sparks or Heat Treatment. It isn't that domestic bliss has mellowed him; "Just Like a Man" starts the album with the same biting delivery we've come to expect from Parker, while both "You Can't Take Love for Granted" and "Anniversary" suggest that Parker's married life hasn't been entirely blissful. Instead, what marks this album is a sense of artistic assuredness, that Parker no longer feels obliged to scoff and growl and is ready to expand his musical persona.

The most obvious changes can be heard in "Life Gets Better" and "You Can't Take Love for Granted," where Parker's melodies could almost be described as pretty (just try saying that about "Discovering Japan" or "Stupefaction"). The latter is particularly striking, in part because it features Parker using a falsetto voice that, up until this album, was kept well under wraps, but also because it finds Parker lending a poignance to his singing that has surfaced but rarely in the past ("You Can't Be Too Strong" from Squeezing Out Sparks was the closest he'd come before this). Not only do such new developments leave Parker sounding wonderfully refreshed, they give his older mannerisms a new life, because Parker's mode of expression has been so significantly broadened. Thus, when Parker goes from the understated anger of "Passive Resistance" to the fiery passion of "Sounds Like Chains," it's hard not to be impressed by the shift in intensity.

Although there are touches of the Rumour-era Parker - "Last Couple On the Dance Floor" could as easily have been on The Up Escalator - the overall sound is equally varied. George Small's keyboards are as likely to dominate the sound as Brinsley Schwartz's guitar, and the light, lyrical approach he takes gives the album an unexpected gentleness at times (not to mention a better shot at making it onto the American airwaves). Of course, the album does get down and dirty when needed, from the sweaty funk of "(Too Late) The Smart Bomb" to the rocking middle section of "Anniversary," but the general sense of the album is that Parker has found a musical voice that doesn't lean on the ghost of the Rumour the way Another Grey Area unfortunately did.

In short, The Real Macaw is the beginning of Graham Parker's artistic maturity, finding him addressing both his topics and his music in a strikingly adult way. And if this is just the beginning, it's a sure bet that his best is yet to come.

Reproduced with kind permission from J.D. Considine.

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