Jimmy Barnes: Defiant assessment – acquainted however dependable territory from the indestructible rocker

“He’s been wondering lately, where did all the good times go?” While this line within the opening track on Jimmy Barnes’ new album is ostensibly a few couple suffering to make ends meet, it’s arduous no longer to think about Barnes mendacity in a medical institution mattress, a ordinary sight lately: improving from an infection, then hip surgical procedure, then bacterial pneumonia, then open center surgical procedure, then hip surgical procedure back … however ultimately “it’s a new day”, as Barnes sings on the second one monitor, a sentiment delivered with no query mark.

If you’re questioning the place all of the just right instances are, it kind of feels Barnes’ resolution is: anyplace the hell I would like them to be and, till all of it ends, I’m going to be a rock celebrity. Specifically a rock celebrity of the past due 80s and early 90s, when he didn’t have to decorate down, à los angeles grunge, or gloss up, à los angeles ozone-depleting poodle steel, and as an alternative slipped on a leather-based jacket and leaned into the digital camera as a freight educate pulled out in the back of him.

Defiant lands smack bang in the midst of that Peak Barnes Moment and it’s no twist of fate that whilst Barnes shared the songwriting with some previous palms and near-family, the manufacturing is given over to that grasp of Australiana rock, Kevin Shirley. You’d know his paintings from early Silverchair, the Screaming Jets, the Angels, Baby Animals, Cold Chisel … and Tina Arena. You’d know his paintings through the ringing readability on your ears.

It’s within the in-your-face drum sound (that snare snap is sharpened to some extent) and forward-facing guitars (you must do your hair within the mirrored image from the shine on them), and it’s within the cautious center floor of keyboards and a smattering of contemporary nation to turn vary. You can recognise it within the prominence given to each corrugation of that lived-through voice and the softening agent of wealthy backing vocals and, within the powered-up ballad Beyond The Riverbend, even within the bagpipes. If this album had been any further 1990s, it might include a Hawkeian cigar and a Rachel haircut.

A track like Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t has the skinny-arse shaking beat of the Rolling Stones or the Faces, however the ones drums received’t assist you to do anything else rather then stomp. Things are a bit of lighter in opener That’s What You Do For Love, its “woah-ohs” softening the bottom, however the backing vocals of an escalating refrain and a hero-cast guitar solo don’t face up to the temptation to move complete back-of-the-beerbarn anthemic.

If the muscular rock of Nothing Comes For Nothing and the brassy southern soul Sea Of Love, perhaps essentially the most fulfilling track at the album, offers Barnes a second to ease again at the throat – however there’s little proof he was once in search of respite. He rips it up within the identify monitor and pushes it to the sides within the husky Never Stop Loving You; even at half-force in Dig Deep he feels robust, managed somewhat than uncooked in opposition to the saloon piano. What center operation?

That operation and its aftermath, on the other hand, does play via Barnes’ lyrical focal point. Not simply in the most obvious I-get-knocked-down-I-get-up-again rugged roar of the identify monitor’s “I don’t get tired, I just higher/I stand defiant”, however within the reflections of a person given but any other likelihood.

There are throwbacks to the tales he’s instructed us in his collection of massively a success memoirs. Of errors and service, like The Long Road’s declaration that “I’m on the long road to perdition”, and of coming via a adolescence the place “if you showed any weakness, the streets will make you bleed”, as he sings in Dig Deep. And there may be Never Stop Loving You’s transparent view of the headaches and satisfactions of a protracted love affair that was once no longer simplest life-saving however life-affirming.

It’s true that this makes for an album that might hardly ever be stated to wreck new floor or succeed in stellar heights. But it’s additionally true that it nails the necessities of Jimmy Barnes – and much more so, the Jimmy Barnes that individuals sought after to listen to within the just right and the dangerous instances nearly 1/2 a century in the past.