NEWLYWED: White Bread Black Beer gives the impression of having been made by a man who has discovered contentment.
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In rock and roll, sometimes you have to whisper to be heard. If you’re 50 and have been out of the pop consciousness for most of the last 20 years, a frontal assault might just seem embarrassing. You’re likely going to have ease back in from the side — especially if you’ve always been more comfortable in the margins.
Even if anyone was expecting a new album from Green Gartside, who’s been performing since the late ’70s as Scritti Politti, no one expected the attention that’s been generated by White Bread Black Beer (Nonesuch/Rough Trade). In England the CD has garnered raves, in this country major pieces in the New Yorker and the New York Times. To see Gartside staring out from those pages in close-cropped reddish hair and beard was a jolt to those of us who remembered the MTV-ready pop star of the mid ’80s, his hair dyed blond and hanging floppily over his forehead, impeccably dressed with a subtlety that made Duran Duran look like a bunch of tired old tarts.
None of that — or the gorgeous radio-friendly white-boy soul of 1985’s Cupid & Psyche 85 (Warner Bros.) — took away from the fact that Gartside’s performing name came from a book by the Italian Communist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Or that articles and reviews of the band were filled with chat about post-structuralism and praxis. What got some of us lower orders about C&P 85, however, was that though Gartside didn’t do anything as gauche as try to ape soul music, the album displayed loving tenderness for a genre that, at the time, not many people seemed interested in.
But get past the perfect hooks of the hit “Perfect Way,” the sugar of Gartside’s not-quite-falsetto voice, and you find doubt and ambiguity all over the place. He replaced the steadfastness of soul with contingency: “I got a perfect way to make a certain a maybe,” he crooned. And he acknowledged the artificiality and the allure of the pop image he’d adopted: “I’m empty by definition/I got a lack girl that you’d love to be.”
The first half of the title White Bread Black Beer is, like those lines, Gartside’s bit of self-depreciation at being a white guy smitten with black music. (The second half of the title refers to his favorite tipple, Guinness.) His voice is a touch breathier than it was two decades ago, and as mellifluous as ever. Even when the numbers seem (as late Beatles songs often did) like two or three songs stitched together, and even when the lyrics are baffling (which is often), his songwriting shows a talent for hooks.
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And yet this is an album that you lean into, as if receiving a happy confidence. Gartside recorded it in the back room of his house in the London district of Hackney. That’s fitting, because it has the sound of contented solitary tinkering. It moves with the ease of a hobby and the sweetness of a declaration of love meant solely for the ears of the beloved. (Gartside recently married his long-time girlfriend.)
There are nods to funk, soul, and ’60s British pop. Overall, though, the sound might be called nursery-rhyme baroque. “The Boom Boom Bap” plays with nonsense words in the way that ’50s rockers did; a snatch of “Bye, baby bunting” makes its way into another cut. Even Gartside’s Marxist preoccupations are given a fairy-tale cast when he sings, “Been wishing my life away . . . for Robin Hood to be King.” And behind that playfulness, the short chiming guitar strokes can carry the crystalline ping of a harpsichord.
White Bread Black Beer gives the impression of having been made by a man who’s discovered contentment (“Locked” is the loveliest ode to domestic happiness since Talking Heads’ “Naive Melody”) without giving into complacency. One line can stand for the ardor Gartside must have found within him to come back so confidently after being so long away: “The limits of my longing I’ve yet to discover.”