Album Review: Paolo Nutini - 'Last Night In The Bittersweet'
After a string of comeback shows, the ticket sales practically ephemeral in how quickly they were snapped up, Paolo Nutini is back with Last Night In The Bittersweet — a masterclass in comebacks, and a fantastically crafted album.
It’s always hard coming back after a long break. Re-announcing yourself to the world, re-emerging into a music landscape you’ve been absent from for a while and having to re-carve your musical identity on a world that may have moved on. But not for Paolo Nutini. For the Scottish singer-songwriter, a little older, a little wiser and a little more contemplative, it’s apparently easy — Last Night In The Bittersweet, his first full length release since 2014’s Caustic Love, is so effortlessly him and so effortlessly unique as to basically be unfair.
Having disappeared from the limelight over the past few years, with just a handful of South American appearances (and a one off in Scotland) back in 2017, I doubt I was the only one to wonder whether he’d ever come back; with however many awards — not least of which is an Ivor Novello award for best album — and however many streams to his name, he’d already made a hell of a legacy for himself.
But thank God he did, because Last Night in the Bittersweet is phenomenal. Not even necessarily its songs — there are some incredible, soul-stirring tracks, but it perhaps lacks some of the instant standouts that previous offerings have had — but as an album, it’s just so incredibly tuned and balanced. From those first passionate wails of opener Afterneath, accompanied by samples taken from Tarantino’s True Romance, and that repeated ‘this will be the end’, to the final ‘good night’ of heartfelt closer Writer, Last Night in the Bittersweet is a journey; more of an emotional odyssey than it is a musical resurgence. It has the highest of highs — the almost unexpected brilliance of Children of the Stars, or the fantastically upbeat ear worm of a song Desperation come to mind — and the lowest lows, with Everywhere, Take Me Take Mine and Through The Echoes particularly showcasing Paolo’s songwriting prowess and his just ridiculously good voice as he cries and howls, vocals breaking and shuddering under the insurmountable force of his passion. But it also has everything in between. The ethereal immersion of Stranded Words, for instance, which is immediately cinematic in its contemplative and haunting gentleness, instantly bringing to mind a group of friends around a campfire, is followed by the distorted rock of Lose It, the final screams piercing in their power, which is in turn followed by the poppy, romantic, Americana-esque nostalgia of Petrified In Love.
And it’s not *even* the songs. It’s the general flow. Every four and a half minutes (give or take) of the 16 song, 72 minute album just flips the previous four and a half minutes on its head. From anyone else, it would seem like a random collection of songs — just a bucket of words and melodies thrown haphazardly on a track listing, hoping desperately that, to everyone’s blessed relief, some method to the madness would emerge. That, somehow, the sewn together patchwork would seamlessly work.
Yet for Paolo the hope was evidently just staunch belief. Between the risks that the album seems to have taken in its departure both from Paolo’s past discography and the general ‘pop’ industry in general, and the almost unwavering certainty and determination shown in even the most painful moments of vulnerability on the most poignant and open points of the meandering spectrum of sounds the album possesses, not a single moment of doubt exists.
Lyrical doubt, sure — when he tells his lover “I don’t know what to do or say anymore” on the stirring Shine a Light, you find yourself asking whether it’s as much an admission of a sort of a musical, existential fugue as it is just romantic troubles — but from an artistic perspective, the album is a phenomenally confident return from a singer absent from both our ears and our airwaves for far too long.
A string of instantly sold-out in-store performances — and a one-off Revive Live show at the 350~ capacity Cavern Club in Liverpool — precede an extensive tour of also mostly sold-out European shows, culminating in two sold-out shows at the prestigious Alexandra Palace at the tail end of October and an equally sold-out show at the Aberdeen Music Hall.
Basically, buy tickets for the Scottish libertine while you can — and I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say it’s good to have you back Paolo.
Words by James O’Sullivan
