Where happiness stands in for medical-grade heroin, the Hammer horror that is 2020 has succeeded in making needle-sick trauma junkies of many otherwise sober, upstanding folks. In these Blizzard of Ozz-inspired days, when anything goes exceptionally right for a moment, it now feels deviant in its rarity, forcing some of us to jerk, twitch, and look over our shoulders, paranoid pupils dilated to the diameter of our most recent reckoning with The Year of the Reckoning. But deep always calls unto deep, and an inconceivable year has a way of summoning out the equally unprecedented in humankind. In that spirit and with gusto swings Gary Barlow, down the cockle stairs of calamity like a calypso-confettied Cnut The Great. His raffiné fifth solo album entitled Music Played By Humans in tow, he has come this Christmas to offer us the world’s most flawless longitudinal cheer follow-up to a deeply flawed annum. Our man has brought along an 80-piece orchestra too, so you may as well surrender now, no matter how Grinchly you believe yourself to be. There is, blissfully, nowhere for your cochlea to cower from the contentment headed to your head via this oracular ornament!
There are those of us who like to make sense of wayward ole life by way of lists, and some of us may go so far as to print them on cardstock, for effect only, of course. This goes for things as mundane as groceries and certainly for events as viridescent as Gary Barlow – not that we fast-and-louche furiosos here at QRO would personally know or employ any such neurotic nerd, er, “note-taking nymphette.” But if we did… La! Thrillingly thwarted. Fabulously foiled. Utterly undermined! In order to provide even half a comprehensive list of the songs this mahout of a music-man has written, co-written, produced, and/or fledged for other artists would nimbly dwarf the mileage and magnitude of Santa’s panoramic “Naughty List,” even should you take the preliminary measure of removing every politician from the scroll ahead of time. Barlow is an absolute chieftain at cross-disciplinary songcraft coupled with longform artistic thinking, and he has the orotund career to show for it as well.
Say you were not necessarily a fan of Barlow’s initial claim to fame, Britain’s pervasively popular Take That. Fair enough, despite being a bit automatic and perhaps potted. To dismiss Barlow as a common himbo would be your first and worst mistake. Do you like The Lion King? Yeah, that was him singing backup with Rick Astley behind Elton John on “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?” Do you enjoy musical masterminds at all? How about people who were privately commissioned to write the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee single in 2012 and further charged with organizing/producing the entire concert that took place outside of Buckingham Palace in celebration of that historic occasion?
If the answers to these or almost any other sonically superlative questions is “yes,” Gary Barlow is for you. If you like mistletoe, Moulin Rouge, intellectual back gardens, whimsy, elation, nostalgia, or messages of hope, Music Played By Humans should be in rotation on your turntable as of five minutes ago. Be forewarned however: this juke joint has not been rolled for thrift. The record has fat, fanciful form, both physically and as a matter of philosophical underpinning.
The endless entries on Barlow’s other professional “Nice List” will simultaneously scramble your brake-heavy brain and empty your seditious Santa bag in mere New York nanoseconds. Musically galvanized early in youth by the likes of Elton John and Depeche Mode, and later in life by Kate Bush duetting with Peter Gabriel, Barlow formally entered his future field at all of 15 years of age via (tellingly!) a Christmas song called “Let’s Pray For Christmas” done for the BBC’s breathtakingly quaint Pebble Mill at One. Fast forward to helping officially crash the U.K. Ticketmaster websites in 2010 when Take That reformed to tour their return record called Progress and its lead single “The Flood” becoming literally the fastest selling U.K. single of the century in the same minute. Attempting to argue against appeal that all-encompassing becomes about as relevant as what Australian comic Tim Minchin brilliantly refers to as “fridge magnetism,” meaning that your statements are about as full of littleness and plastic kitsch as the tourist’s refrigerator magnet you now sound like.
Should you still wish to give it a foolhardy try, Barlow’s silent, gentlemanly rebuttal would include: producing for Charlotte Church, writing for Lily Allen, Sir Elton, T-Pain, and Delta Goodrem (to name but a glimmering trifle), climbing Kilimanjaro in 2009 to raise money for Comic Relief, replacing Simon Cowell on The X Factor in 2011, writing the musical score for the Broadway production of Finding Neverland, instituting arguably the internet’s best set of routine quarantunes called “The Crooner Sessions” to entertain his fans during the pandemic, covering the deathless Massive Attack for Children In Need, and running a 5k with troops stationed at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan while there to perform for the Armed Forces. Oh wait, and for a salutary sprig of seasonal seasoning: a cameo as a soldier in the trenches of Crait for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Take that and run with it (straight to the record store to buy this cavalier cantor’s latest canonical creation)!
Say you are a sword-in-hand, flamingly unapologetic royalist like your resident bluestocking here. Gary Barlow, in addition to having personally served Her Majesty in multiple roles equivalent to a kind of musical monarchy all their own, is pastorale princeliness incarnate if ever there was any – and this album is ragtime regality at its froghair finest. Not only has Barlow deftly sidestepped the fatuous markdown cycle of the traditional pop singer wherein relegation to the terra nullius of VH1 Top Ten Countdowns is nearly graffitied in lamb’s blood on one’s destiny, his stage story is much more A Life Less Ordinary (the movie and the vibe). Like a one-man junta of jams that happen to be Rh-compatible with damn near every kind of ear, he has likewise somehow found time along the harmonic highway to earn both an OBE and the coveted Blue Peter Gold Badge. Six Ivor Novellos is nothing to sniff at either.
Barlow’s first solo offering post Since I Saw You Last in 2013, Music Played By Humans is a resplendent record, irenic in tone, message, sound and style. Its Sinatra-like strapline is simply: be joyful. Kicking off with a conversational introduction by Mr. Barlow over the arm-tingling and amorphous sounds of the orchestra warming up, “Who’s Driving This Thing” is a veritable enfilade of horns, rolling out tendril tones like beauteous fiddlehead ferns if they knew how to flute. The flamenco-inflected “Elita”, which features Michael Bublé and Sebastian Yatra, brings Latin and even Kaiso-like undulations to your underbelly. “The Big Bass Drum”, with its opening cadenza of piano and finger snaps has the spirit of Dean Martin presiding over it. “This Is My Time” is a tinkling love ballad taking place on a piano that sounds like it is housed in a metaphysical menagerie. As if that weren’t recommendation enough, it is also a song about being ready to step across the proverbial veil if love bids it. More of this sort of thing, pretty and please.
It would be ruefully remiss not to mention that the actual humans playing the instruments on Music Played By Humans are, to the last string, bow, reed, and brass bell, nothing short of Stradivarian. The sheer heft and wealth of superstar artists that show up to busk with Barlow here are well worth your buck. Their cumulative level of technical skill and natural capability? Their overall quality as musicians? Not to be seen again in one place anytime soon outside of classical recordings. The bodacious Beverly Knight on “Enough Is Enough”. Ibrahim Maalouf, going off like Gillespie on “Eleven”. Canada’s own Chilly Gonzales on “Oh What A Day”.
If hilarity, astrology, wit, or all three might be your comodo cup of tea, peep the beaming “Bad Libran” first. A shining spectacle of deciphered references to star signs and birth charts barrel through these lyrics as Barlow attempts to vector-trace the likelihood of love whilst grinningly asserting, “And who the hell am I to argue with bodies way up in the sky / They knew my partner’s major virtue would be vice, to be precise.” Ah, wordplay and proper rhymes and general quip-genius, we meet again. It’s been too long.
Don’t give a rat’s rump about anyone’s rising sign, but love to raise your glass? Try the defiantly direct “Let’s Get Drunk” then, a tippling disco ditty that not only makes you feel inebriated (with bubbles of gladness!) but also mysteriously conjures Xanadu and makes you imagine you are singing along at some Saturnalian rollerskating-imbibing hybrid hop at which The Bee Gees are also in attendance. “Let’s Get Drunk” happens to likewise be the first of five – yes, five! – bonus tracks on Music Played By Humans. Seriously, what could ever be better?
“An unadorned homage to heavenly, heart-centric hedonism,” one might well answer. If so, bask in “Before We Get Too Old,” which features the string stylings of Avishai Cohen. The priceless preamble to this one, about a doctor who stresses exercise for longevity and then conks out like a true gym king at age 35, and all of the iterations of irony that then follow, are Morissette-level morose-magic. This charming canticle makes the case for doing some real loving while you still have time, no matter the soft costs. It is the social missive so desperately needed in the hebetudinous hookup culture of our Tinderific times.
“The Kind Of Friend I Need,” a dream scene in which Barlow and James Corden tunefully take the piss out of each other in the happiest key, may be the most salubrious song you hear this year. “Cute” is such an unforgivably bastardized word in the modern lexicon, used for anything-everything and chiefly for that which is expressly the opposite, that it has almost become a simulacrum of itself by this point. Yet this song is curatively cute in the truest sense of the word. Cute like quolls and couplets.
Music Played By Humans vacillates effortlessly between daydreaming ballads and swing-dance-inducing, up-tempo utensils of undiluted pleasure. It is Pierian and piebald in all the most dynamic, necessary ways. Never is this in better view than on the album’s standout single, “Incredible,” which makes three different appearances on this 19-track treasure, each one delightful. “Incredible” is a big band ballyhoo worthy of both Brian Setzer and Louis Prima. The Chicago-esque video was shot at London’s fabled Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club and will teleport you to better doo-wop days in less than a full watch. The positive effect on your mood, however, will be longer than Roxie Hart’s gams by a country mile. The acoustic rendition at Track 18 is the stuff of Bing Crosby reveries.
Everyone knows that big band, holiday, or purposely-themed pieces of any ilk can lean slummocky almost instantly in the hands of a non-master. However, cradled by a symphonic shogun of Gary Barlow’s breed means a trope becomes not just exactly what it was meant to be, but more than you thought it could be. It becomes less a tribute to this style of music that never should have taken a backseat to anything (even rock-n-roll) and honestly inhabits that same sacred space. Accomplished artists with this kind of ultravalency are getting more and more impossible to find – especially on the now-privateered A-list airwaves. Music Played By Humans is an album that you can see Zooey Deschanel dancing to; it has that kind of zip and zany about its aural aura – the adorably idiosyncratic sort that can cause you to nonchalantly begin referring to your trusty typewriter as a “literary piano” again because (as you will impatiently school your cocked-eyebrow friends) that’s what they were officially called back when music like this was the norm – back when we were unfathomably radio-rich in a way we would never be again, but had no idea.
It was the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles who was the first to suggest on record that all material reality was governed by the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and that these were in turn acted upon by the opposing forces of love and strife. Note here that love and strife are coupled appropriately, like the Janus-masks they have always been and will forever be. 2020 didn’t invent that. Strife has had centerstage for nearly eleven months. Let’s close out twelve with the love part, if you don’t mind. If you have been searching for the otherworldly other side to all of this year’s downwardly-arcing follies and dumb daubs, here is the inverted casus belli to all of the chaos you thought you could not outrun on this calendar. Barlow has brewed the pitch-perfect tincture for countermanding 2020’s takotsubo takeover. This album is the Christmas comedy mask capable of providing a better mood spike than your best eggnog – and not a moment too soon! No matter what your answer to the “quo vadis?” of sound, no matter which jitney cab of jive in which you jig, Gary Barlow is a celebrated cryonaut from a sanguine station you need to get to. Even if you are a committed misanthrope who would much rather die than dance, buy this record so the Whoville deep in your withered heart can have at least one present back this Christmas. Music Played By Humans is, indisputably, for all humans.
