Word: stings
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Under the polished surface of his pop-star persona, Sting is a hopeless romantic, obsessed with the gritty, contradictory textures of human emotion. During the early 1980s, as the lead singer and lyricist for the Police, the brooding bassist used his poetic gifts to dredge up the debris of his own psyche -- and sell millions of records. After going solo in 1985, he injected jazz and politics into the polyrhythmic mix, but his worldly concerns never strayed far from the ardent diplomacy of love...
...Sting continues his meditation on the tangled ways of the heart with 10 Summoner's Tales, actually a collection of 11 songs (if you count the Epilogue) that offer few surprises but many familiar pleasures. True to the album's title, which alludes to Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Sting serenades the listener like a storyteller turning pages in the book of love. The artful introspection of his previous record, 1991's The Soul Cages, has been replaced by a puckish objectivity; each song is a self-contained vignette, distilling a moment or sometimes an entire life, traversing the emotional...
From the wistful ballad Fields of Gold to the insouciant rocker She's Too Good for Me, the lyrics wring pathos and irony from the misfortunes of unlucky lovers. Yet Sting's manners are too refined to let the suffering spoil the lush settings; the shackles in this emotional dungeon are lined with velvet. In Seven Days, pizzicato strings thrum a decorous, mocking waltz as a man muses over various ways to deal with a romantic rival. In the darkly cynical Love Is Stronger than Justice, a man kills his brothers to avoid sharing the affections of a beautiful senorita...
Despite the havoc that Sting's protagonists cause in their quest for connection, they remain doggedly -- and sometimes miserably -- driven by their desire. In It's Probably Me, the narrator clings to a one-sided relationship in a world that's "gone crazy and makes no sense . . . If there's one guy who'd lay down his life for you and die/ It's hard to say it/ I hate to say it, but it's probably me." In an age that has slipped its moral tracks, Sting seems to say, love is the only thing worth fighting...
...album closes with Epilogue (Nothing 'bout Me), a swinging, carefree ditty in which the singer takes a parting shot at his would-be analysts. Like a puppeteer peeking out from behind the curtain, Sting dares the listener to "Pick my brain, pick my pockets/ Steal my eyeballs and come back for the sockets/ Run every kind of test from A to Z/ And you'll still know nothing 'bout me." It's a fittingly elusive coda from pop's most mercurial bard...