Violence Insane in a Beautiful World, the solo album by the Queen drummer, is released. Beautiful and surprising
Roger Taylor at seventy-seven years old he continues to write, sing, play and above all to take a position on the world that passes before him. Insane Violence in a Beautiful Worldthe seventh album of his solo career, was born precisely from this necessity: to place side by side the beauty of the planet and the irrationality with which men seem committed to ruining it.
Insane Violence in a Beautiful World it’s an album that constantly changes tone: the opening with A Beautiful World it immediately clarifies what the center of the project is. Taylor contemplates the Earth as if he had to observe it from afar to remind himself how extraordinary it is. This is where one of the essential elements comes in, the Ndlovu Youth Choir of Limpopo, South Africa. Taylor had become acquainted with the choir through their Zulu-language reinterpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody and ended up involving him in three songs. The group’s voices broaden the music and remove the song from the private dimension of the home studio.
The idyll lasts very little. Insane Violencethe second track and dark half of the album’s title, falls into a completely different atmosphere. Drums, guitars and keyboards build a hard, compressed, almost industrial landscape. It is one of the moments in which Taylor the drummer comes back to the foreground: not so much for his virtuosity, but for the way in which the rhythm becomes a narrative element.
Taylor changes direction again with What Really Matters. After having broadened his gaze to the destiny of the world, he narrows it to the measure of individual life. It’s a song about time and the progressive change of priorities. Here Taylor’s voice matters at least as much as the writing. He no longer possesses, of course, the power of the man who sang I’m in Love with My Car in the Seventies, but its current roughness is part of the story. Age is not hidden: it becomes expressive material.
Don’t Photograph Food instead represents Taylor’s sarcastic side. The target is a contemporaneity obsessed with the exhibition of any experience, even the most banal one. Musically the piece returns to a more direct rock style, built around the riff, and lightens the weight of the previous themes for a few minutes.
It is much more collected I See You Nowa song dedicated to his wife Sarina. Taylor. The second half of the album raises the temperature again. Chump it’s a short and powerful rant, it comes right after Spit In His Eyeanother rapid and oblique episode, closer to the taste for caricature and surreal stories. They are two pieces that contribute to the irregular nature of the album: not everything seems destined to converge in the same place.
The only composition not signed by Taylor also appears at the center of this sequence, Jealous Guy by John Lennon. The Queen drummer considers it one of the great ballads of popular music and chooses to tackle it without trying to replicate Lennon’s vocal fragility.
With Come On Summer (It’s Party Time) everything changes again. The Ndlovu Youth Choir returns and the album opens towards a festive, rhythmic, deliberately immediate pop.
It is therefore logical that the ending, A Great Big Beautiful Worldtake up and broaden the idea of openness. The Ndlovu Youth Choir returns for the third time and Taylor closes the circle. After anger, irony, love, vulnerability and disillusionment, the belief remains that beauty still exists and that it is precisely this that makes the destruction more senseless. The choir is not a simple ornament: it musically represents the escape from solitude.
Roger Taylor, ultimately, does not try to prove that he is still young. It does something more interesting: it uses age as a vantage point. He looks at a world that he considers magnificent and absurd at the same time, he gets angry with what he sees, he makes fun of our little obsessions, he speaks to the woman with whom he shares his life, he pays homage to Lennon and finally he entrusts the brightest part of his message to a choir of young South Africans.
