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Mark Stewart tended to confound expectations wherever he went. Not as a result of he wished to – he simply couldn’t assist it. His innate curiosity, sense of humour and gently provocative nature, coupled together with his huge charisma and sharp thoughts, meant that whereas he devoted his life to creating intensely highly effective music, he didn’t take himself too critically. Spend even a few minutes in his firm and he’d be ribbing you left, proper and centre, barking ten to the dozen in his wealthy Bristolese; this towering post-punk prophet, all six and a half foot of him, had a contact of Tommy Cooper about him.
Stewart died unexpectedly in April 2023 on the age of 62, a pressure of nature all of a sudden silent, however he’d accomplished what would turn into The Fateful Symmetry, his eighth solo album, earlier than his dying. Wanting again at what he labored on over the last decade or so of his life – two new albums with the reformed Pop Group and variations of their basic 1979 debut Y reissued via Mute, plus a few industrial dub solo releases that introduced collectively the likes of Bobby Gillespie, Richard Hell, Kenneth Anger, Penny Rimbaud and Keith Levene – it’s tempting to imagine that this new file would proceed within the vein of his collaborative solo materials: jagged, whacked-out dubstep and menacing funk fusion united by Stewart’s theatrical pronouncements on an array of conspiracy theories and political matters. In that mode, it was usually too simple to dismiss Stewart because the unusual man with the megaphone on the road nook who’d been ranting about the identical factor for 40 years, despite the fact that, deep down, he’s cottoned on to some important reality.
Not that The Fateful Symmetry, regardless of its eerily prescient title, is a few form of warning from past the grave – removed from it. In actual fact, realizing that Stewart has gone, it comes throughout extra like a love letter to life, stuffed with arrestingly stunning songs through which Stewart revels within the superb absurdity of humanity. In a remaining twist he’d little doubt relish, Stewart has produced essentially the most accessible album of his profession, one which mashes collectively swooning chanson and smouldering ballads, new-wave grooves and candy-striped dub, whereas he presents a comparatively restrained efficiency, crooning via the likes of “Neon Lady” and “This Is The Rain” within the method of modern-day Nick Cave, a singer who as soon as claimed that Stewart in his unhinged Pop Group prime “modified every little thing”.
Mute boss Daniel Miller, who started working with Stewart within the early ’80s, means that Stewart wished this album to be extra interesting in order that he would possibly attain a wider viewers – and as soon as he’s snared them with the candy stuff, they may come to understand Stewart’s gnarlier heavyweight gear. Both means, there’s a degree of high quality management on this mission, overseen by Miller, that also permits Stewart to probe and provoke however this time the medium of his message is extra palatable. The noirish digital disco of opener “Reminiscence Of You”, produced with common foil Youth, is sort of deceptively straight, with Stewart singing, “I might’ve wrote a love track” whereas he pours his coronary heart out, craving a greater world.
Stewart was identified for his generosity. In Bristol, he opened doorways for the Wild Bunch and Large Assault, helped Difficult file his breakthrough “Aftermath”, and championed new outfits like Ishmael Ensemble and Younger Echo. Equally, right here he brings collectively a bunch of disparate producers whose mongrel mixture of types complement one another. After the pulsing doom-step of the 23 Skidoo-produced “Crypto Faith” – “That is how I dwell now – some days are higher than others,” he mooches – comes the atmospheric post-punk of Belgian act Mugwump’s “Clean City” (“You’re not alone on this hill of bones”). On Youth’s “Neon Lady”, which options The Raincoats’ Gina Birch and descends into boozy schlager, he asks: “Is it too late, too late for me?” He sounds much more uncovered on “This Is The Rain”, a bruised piano ballad produced together with his Pop Group bandmate Gareth Sager, as he speaks stirringly of “a world the wrong way up and backwards – that is the rain that washes and heals in glory.”
In some methods it’s becoming that Stewart comes full circle on The Fateful Symmetry with an endearing cumbia-style dub, blended by Adrian Sherwood, of “Everyone’s Acquired To Be taught Someday”, initially a success in 1980 for The Korgis, who would have been contemporaries of The Pop Group, though their approaches differed, to place it mildly. “Change your coronary heart, it should astound you,” Stewart sings via distortion, however the message – and his enduring positivity – couldn’t be clearer.
