Sashimi-Grade Soft: Al Stewart's Year of the Cat

A crashing piano chord with an all-six strum of an acoustic guitar and before you know it the vocal has started and you're under way with Lord Grenville from the old rumsodomyandlash Navy but also someone like yourself breaking away from the crowd to the adventure of your new self-determined life. The voice is high and nasal but carries the lyric effortlesly across the cinemascope screen of its imagery. The song rises and spreads like the tide it describes and bears us out to the ocean.

There's a descent in the verses which could be from something by Bread or America (acts who even had to give themselves flavourless names to maximise the impact of their utilitarian soft serve hits): major chord, major seventh of the same chord. But Baby Ima Want You this ain't. Al is inviting you to be like his Lordship and cast yourself to the four winds, all in a sweet middle class voice that never breaks a sweat (mid 70s Roger Daltrey this ain't). He lilts above what turns out to be a one arrangement album: vocal, acoustic guitar, Sratty lead guitar, lush string section, bright piano, polite drums, and a bass whose nice white side of the funk fence. So why should this session musician heavy record jammed into its era work so very well today?

Well, it's Al himself. It works not despite his quiet-Beatle voice (he even looked a bit like George) and uncomplaining approach to the things he observes but because of those things. For this listener who can't tell you the lyrics of most of his favourite songs it was a revelation to read and be absorbed by these tales of travel, disappointing love and sex, reincarnation and seduction that seems to have a shivering sinister purpose to it. Stewart narrates these tales but is almost never the protagonist. The intriguing travel seduction of the title track and the spooky dried out sexuality of Broadway Hotel are told in the second person, by an observer, a ghost behind the curtain or osmosing through the wall paper of the hotel rooms or the gluey air of the rained out landscapes elsewhere. Al steps out of his skin to find these stories. With that kind of touch Bread could have been his backing band and he'd still send shivers.

But there's something else. This wash of what never sounds like anything but musicians for hire playing through such uniform arrangements also never feels as bland as it should. Alan Parsons was at the console, fresh from work with a Pink Floyd whose own stadium ready angst was held together by Adult Oriented Rock friendly US stations. Year of the Cat never tries to be Dark Side of the Moon but it doesn't have to. Parsons found the sliver of light that he could put at the centre of his full but uncluttered production so that even the overall sameness from track to track never fatigues.

In 1976 I was primed to meet the gut punch of punk rock soaring o'er the waves from London and shouldn't have had a bar of this. Even more recently as I approached listening to this album in order to write about it I wondered if I should skip the entire exercise rather be deflated in the frowning light of 2013.

This is about the same time as the Stevie Nicks Fleetwood Mac brought out their two iconic albums which cast their breathless resin over the entire musical landscape and even now resonate with contemporary self-identifying indie musicians who either don't know or don't care that they are  fuelling a new sub-mainstream with an old flavourless one. If just one of them could champion this album for the right reasons we might have something. As it is ...