Paul Weller – Saturns Pattern (Colored Vinyl LP) * * *

Paul Weller’s 2015 Studio Album Saturns Pattern on Colored LP.

Color of Vinyl Subject to Change Without Notice / Call to Confirm Colored Copies Are Still Available

Saturns Pattern is the twelfth solo album by English singer-songwriter and musician Paul Weller, released on May 18, 2015. The album reached number two on the UK Albums Chart.

In 2014, he headed back into his regular recording haunt, Black Barn Studio in the Surrey countryside, to work on Saturns Pattern, his follow-up to 2012’s tour-de-force of cut-up pop-punk-kraut and abstract escapades Sonik Kicks. Working alongside his regular sound-desk collaborator Jan “Stan” Kybert (Oasis, Bjork, Massive Attack) in the producer’s chair for the first time, and with trusty engineer Charles Rees close at hand, he had a very different album in mind. He wanted something with a bit of swing and space in it. And so work on Saturns Pattern began.

As is typical with a Paul Weller album, you’d struggle to define it stylistically. There a soulful feel that encompasses it all, especially on songs like the bustling, piano-fed “Going My Way,” or the wonderful Southern-fried organ precision of “Pick It Up.” But no soul album could contain the skyscraping blues explosion of “White Sky” or the slide-guitar frenzy of “In The Car…,” which Weller describes as his “M25 Blues.” There’s a psychedelic, jazzy, Age of Aquarius feel to songs like “Phoenix,” too, as well as the magnificently expansive summer breeze that is the closing “These City Streets.” It’s a soulful kaleidoscope of an album that feels both out-of-step and ahead of its time.