Soul cages torrent

Although it was painful, it wrote itself almost, free-associating. I only realised what it was about as I went along. The journey back to where I came from. The idea of death. Lines about this father thing kept coming up. Something was saying I had to deal with it. But I have to of course, and it serves a purpose. Even though death isn't much of a party subject it's valuable to me to think about it.

I figured that I'd have to go through some sort of process where I would get this stuff out. Once I'd worked that out, I realised that I was going to have to write a record about death. I didn't really want to. I don't think the 'Soul Cages' is going to conform to any of their expectations - I think they're expecting a record about ecology or something. If they're surprised, then I'm pleased.

And the next record will hopefully surprise them again. I enjoy that music, and I like making it, but it didn't seem to apply. So the bulk of the record is based on Celtic folk melodies.

I'd written a lot of little fragments of music, but there were no real ideas coming out. I was genuinely frightened. At one point I thought, "This is it, I've just dried up! Perhaps I was afraid of what might come out if I wrote something. I think there was an awful lot of denial and blockage going on in my subconscious - there were things I wasn't ready to face.

This went on until after I'd gotten a band together and had two months before the whole process [of rehearsing and recording] was supposed to begin. I still didn't have a damn word. I spoke to Bruce Springsteen about it. He was just starting his own album, and I said, "Bruce, I don't know what to do. Have you got any bad songs you don't want" He offered me a couple.

Then one day I just sat at the piano and started to free associate, mumbling to myself there was nobody in the house - and the mumbling got louder and gradually I started to sing lines.

Words started to flow out 'Island of Souls' was one of the first. So I wrote down what I thought were just disconnected images and lines.

Quite a few were about the sea, and all were linked somehow to my father and his death. Suddenly, I realised I was mourning my father, and then the whole thing poured out of me like a river - which became the central image on 'All This Time'. That album was very personal, confessional, and therapeutic in terms of facing death and loss. But I guess you could say the therapy worked, because now I have a new sense of freedom, a desire to move on and make songs solely intended as entertainments, designed to amuse.

Liner Notes Sting explains There seemed to be a certain amount of anxiety regarding this new piece of work. To be honest, at the time I had very little to show in the way of material. In fact, since the recording of ' Nothing Like The Sun', in , I hadn't written as much as a rhyming couplet, much less a whole song. I was suffering from what they call 'writer's block' It wasn't any fun at all. I signed up Hugh Padgham to produce and hoped that a deadline and a couple of contracts would jump start the proceedings.

No shortage of melodies, chord structures, harmonic themes, intros, middle eights, codas, cadenzas and contrapuntal calypsoes. But not one line of a lyric - nothing I walked from one arid beach to the next. My deadline, like an ominous tidal wave, was getting closer and closer and was about to swamp me. A few people I cared about were abruptly taken off the planet, plus the usual mid-life sort of stuff. No, we're going to have to look much further back than that.

Let's take that long road back to the beginning of things. The river flowed to the sea Review from Q magazine by Peter Kane Some words of warning to all would-be millionaire rock stars: the job isn't always what it's cracked up to be. Whether you're the man of the people Phil Collins type, a hermetically sealed George Michael or another ageing juvenile Rod Stewart in the making, there comes a time when you have to stop trying to make it in films, put an end to scouring the globe in search of painless diversion or using your name to sway public opinion and get back to making records.

Sometimes it even hurts; especially if you used to be called Gordon Sumner, came from sound blue collar stock and have trouble reconciling your natural, decent, liberal instincts with the excessive rewards of your chosen career. It's been a good three years since ' Nothing Like The Sun' and 'The Soul Cages' accompanying press release, penned tellingly by the man himself, ranks much of the writer's block suffered during that fallow period when he still managed to take on the guise of Great White Protector Of The Rain Forests.

His muse must have been merely puffing her feet up, though, for he's gouged out of himself another most Sting-like affair: a panoramic sweep of the soul that is fastidiously mounted, overtly literate and, against the odds even occasionally quite moving, not least on the fragile closing ballad 'When The Angels Fall' or 'Why Should I Cry For You's' elegantly simple melody set against a looping Third World beat.

Water is everywhere, whether looking out across the river and beyond on the deceptively bouncy 'All This Time' or going under for good in 'The Wild Wild Sea' which as a tune, manages to exhibit distinct latter-day sea shanty possibilities. Even the title track, which comes complete with nagging rock guitar motif seems to warn of an eternal watery damnation a full five fathoms below the surface, so much so that it's hard not to put all this down to his "going native" in the Amazon and a greening belief that salvation lies only in the return to a more natural order.

Few would argue with that or even the grim Biblical forebodings of 'Jeremiah Blues Part 1 ', one of those jazzy funk items with a bit of disembodied piano-tinkling thrown in that he often favours.

In the face of such gushing humanity, the slender Latinate instrumental, 'St Agnes And The Burning Train', comes as a welcome breather. As one who has built himself virtually from scratch, Sting has proved a master of artifice as well as one of rock's more articulate practitioners.

He's not unaware of the ambiguous reaction that his caring, sharing, all-purpose, adult-branded music tends to provoke, nor is he likely to be oblivious to the fact that, in the true spirit of the times, sensitivity sells, especially when it's as carefully packaged as this. Still, let's face it, there are worse things to be accused of. Review from Rolling Stone magazine by Paul Evans Something of a pop culture superman, Sting can seem like a daunting - and perhaps overly self conscious - model of higher evolution.

A hitmaker erudite enough to quote Prokofiev, a studiously literate lyricist equally fond of venturing into the mists of Jungian psychology and citing such sly ironists as Nabokov, and a millionaire who's fastidiously politically correct, Sting is a rock star of a complexity that never could have been imagined by such raw geniuses as Little Richard. A tireless media crusader for the Brazilian rain forest and a more credible actor than most rockers-as-actors, he's also a proud father and the lurky possessor of looks sharp enough to qualify him as a fashion-mag cover boy.

The Renaissance man on hyperdrive, he gulps challenge with every breath he takes. Highly serious and sonically gorgeous, 'The Soul Cages' is Sting's most ambitious record yet - and maybe his best.

Like 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles', from , and ' Nothing Like the Sun', from , it forgoes Police-style catchiness and the safety of conventional song structure for vast swirls of sound that build to either musical or emotional crescendo; the nine pieces are minidramas of intensity and will.

What elevates Sting's new music is its freer, deeper and more unified mood. If Sting's deliberate smarts open him up to charges of being an artist who too obviously thinks while he dances, 'The Soul Cages' may trash that perception.

It's his most moving performance. It's also a difficult one. Dense with images of dead fathers and trapped sons, of bitter weather, of moonlight and oceans that threaten oblivion or tempt with release, the songs seldom waver from a deep fatalism that, no matter how romantic its guise, is almost unbearably tense.

The long-standing sidemen of Sting's solo career, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and keyboardist Kenny Kirkland, undergird a crew of players who seem to relish the test of the intricate, longish material. Drummer Manu Katche provides complicated, sometimes free, sometimes tight propulsion, and Marsalis remains Sting's ace ally, insinuating graceful, nearly Arabic melodies.

Sting's bass playing is supple throughout, and his voice - startling, ever since the Police's 'Roxanne' - has gained subtlety. It's now a truly expressive instrument, whether slurring in a sort of artful Scottish burr or clear-throatedly declaiming. At times recalling the highly textured moodiness of such hip classical movie composers as Angelo Badalamenti 'Twin Peaks' and Ennio Morricone 'The Mission' and any number of spaghetti-western masterpieces , the music has a cinematic breadth.

It helps that the sounds are so enticing. They pull the listener into verbal landscapes that, for all their lush description, are psychic wastelands - cages, snares, dead ends. In 'All This Time', Christian hope is undercut: "Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth The effect at times is a bit overwhelming, but it's gripping, too - the tossing and turning of an anxious superman.

The timing couldn't have been better. Pro-rain forest activist and generally concerned rock star Sting has released his third solo album, The Soul Cages. For maximum environmental protection, the CD is packaged in a "digipack," a fold-over cardboard case designed as an alternative to the wasteful, tree-killing longbox.

The records not only supplement each other perfectly; they also help answer one of the most vital questions ever considered by man. Which is more irritating-mosquitoes or pompous rock stars The Soul Cages has little to do with rain forests or any subject as overtly global as Brazilian Rainforest.

Like everything Sting has done since the Police established themselves as the most commercially successful of all power-pop bands, the album is intended as a serious artistic statement. Early word of mouth had it that the record would be a return to Sting's rock- oriented roots especially since he is playing bass, not guitar, for the first time since the Police's 'Synchronicity' in Blaring guitars probably wouldn't be appropriate anyway, since the songs are mostly a sullen bunch that explore personal and romantic loss and relationships gone astray, with the recent death of Sting's father casting a shadow over the proceedings.

In 'Island of Souls', a shipbuilder's son mourns the death of his dad from a work accident, while Sting's own loss is more directly expressed in 'All This Time' and the mournful 'Why Should I Cry for You' In comparison, the inevitable tract about world destruction, 'Jeremiah Blues Part 1 ', sounds like good news.

Somber themes, even those of an intimate bent, are nothing new for a Sting record. But rarely have songs about feeling awful sounded so stillborn and unmoving.

The man was never as much of a sucker for a hook as Elton John was, but throughout 'The Soul Cages', Sting defiantly resists hummability as if a mere catchy pop chorus were too frivolous for such weighty content. Likewise, his latest band-a mix of jazz and rock veterans-seems to be taking its cue from its leader, a man incapable of leaving a simple thought alone.

Just when the group settles into a cozy groove on 'Jeremiah Blues Part 1 ' for instance, the mood is broken with a noodling piano break. At other times, the arrangements don't make sense: 'All This Time', which should be one of the record's most touching moments, is upbeat for no discernible reason. Review from The Baltimore Sun by J D Considine If making a successful rock and roll album was simply a matter of following a formula, Sting's new album, 'The Soul Cages', which was released yesterday, would be a recipe for disaster.

Not a masterpiece per se but a declaration of honest, quality progressive metal. Best moment: Beautiful, Point One. The only way to get the CD is via [email protected] With thanks to Joerg for sending me the album. The progressive metal they play I consider as innovative, influenced by late 80's Fates Warning and Sieges Even, but what defines their sound is the simultaneous use of distorted and clean guitars that creates a series of textures and distinguishes them from the masses.

The female vocals are once again used with caution, injecting the magic when not expected, ultimately contributing massively to SC's very melodic character. The first half of the album is more or less a continuation of "Soul Cages" with three long, mid-tempo and beautifully laid out compositions; this type of songwriting I see as equal to the first epics of Shadow Gallery that set the scene of the progressive metal to come in the 90's and beyond.

The first half - and most interesting part of this album - concludes with an "arpeggio" that lasts about a minute, while the three tracks that open the album are among the best in SC's career, with 'Moments' summing up the qualities of the band. Although I would still consider their debut as their best effort, there are Moments of true brilliance here that reminds us how sometimes excellent music does not get the recognition that it deserves. Another 4 stars in a discography that has never gone wrong.

The title of a recent thread describes perfectly the debut album of these great German prog-metallers. Within the 40 minutes that this album lasts, the talent of these musicians is revealed through a vast number of original ideas, disproportionate to the album length and rare in these times of Dream Theater and Queensryche clones. The album bears the ''freshness'' of the 90's in prog-metal but also a strange originality. The most eclectic element of the sound is the eccentric, German-accent vocals that might discourage the listener at the first instance.

However flawed the vocals are, the combination with the ethereal female vocals at several instances generates a ''magic'' atmosphere. The speed of the compositions generally ranges in mid-tempos. The strong asset of the album is by far the excellent musicianship - technically it approaches perfection.

The twin guitars resemble to 80's classic metal but also to the early Fates Warning albums. Despite the heaviness of the guitars, all lines are based on melodic ideas, following a similar approach with the early 90's albums of Sieges Even e. Steps, A Sense of Change but excluding the use of symphonic instruments, violins etc and concentrating on guitar melodies. The album comprises of 6 medium length compositions minutes and 2 short tracks Uncommunicado , a melodic acoustic intro to the title track and Rainbow , the melancholic piano-based album outro.

The album appears unconventional even in structure, as the short tracks appear towards the end with no intention to ''break'' the sequence. From a technical point of view, it is better not to talk about the full compliance of these files and tracks taken directly from the CD. A CD release is a CD release, and a stream release is a stream release.

I was curious where the difference might come from? I doubt they prepare different files for CD and for streaming but I guess we'll never know. Anyway, thank you - I didn't know Deezer allows downloading. This is a remaster by Dave Collins from remastered series of Sting's discography.

Why not? Using Python, you can intercept the CDDA files as they are sent to your computer for playback since there is a known exploit in Deezer's systems, effectively downloading the files right from Deezer's database.

It is very easy to do. A CD release is a CD release, and a stream release is a stream release I think he downloaded the stream from someone else so he does not know how to explain it or does not want to waste time explaining how he was able to download them.