Around the World in a Day Review

The nerve of the decision is admirable. He had the biggest record in the world and followed it with an album of Middle Eastern instrumentation and sixties pastiche, released with no single announced and no video, apparently to break the machine that had just been built around him. The nerve does not make the songs better. Raspberry Beret is wonderful, a story song with a string arrangement and a chorus that never gets old.

Pop Life is a good groove with a sour lyric about people who want fame. Condition of the Heart is a genuinely lovely piano ballad. Everything else is costume. The title track piles on darbuka and oud and goes nowhere, Tamborine is a throwaway, and America is a six minute jam that mistakes repetition for hypnosis. It is short, it is odd, and it contains two songs he was right to be proud of. As a whole record it is the sound of an artist proving a point to a label rather than making something he needed to make.